The easiest way for teams to run two-way conversations. One shared inbox for text, voice, and chat — built for the businesses your customers would rather message than call.
A dealership confirms a test drive. A clinic reminds a patient about tomorrow. A realtor answers a question about a beach house while the lead is still warm. None of them picked up a phone. None of them opened a ticket. They tapped out a sentence, hit send, and a person on the other end saw it land in a shared inbox - next to the call log, the chat thread, and the last six messages from that same customer.
That inbox is Avochato. It is not trying to reinvent the conversation. It is trying to make sure a business can actually hold one - across SMS, MMS, RCS, voice, and live chat - without losing the thread between channels, teammates, or the CRM the company already runs on.
The company sells something deceptively dull: a place for messages to go. The interesting part is how many businesses turned out to need exactly that.
"The easiest way for teams to run two-way conversations."
// Avochato, in its own wordsBy the mid-2010s, the way customers wanted to talk had quietly flipped. Texting overtook calling. Most people let unknown numbers ring out. Yet the average company was still built around the call - the hold music, the voicemail, the support queue nobody enjoyed. There was a gap between how customers actually communicated and how businesses were equipped to answer.
The tools that did exist were either consumer apps with no place in a regulated workflow, or enterprise telephony stacks that treated a text message as an afterthought. A salesperson texting a lead from a personal phone left no record. A support team had no shared view. A marketer blasting an SMS campaign had no way to actually reply when someone wrote back.
The numbers Avochato keeps taped to the wall. They explain the whole business in four percentages.
The problem was never that customers went quiet. It's that businesses were listening on the wrong channel.
// The gap Avochato set out to closeIn 2016, Alex De Simone, Christopher Neale, and Ted Hanson started Avochato in Mill Valley, just north of San Francisco. The bet was not that messaging would matter - that part was obvious. The bet was that the company who made it simple for an ordinary sales or support team to adopt, with the compliance and integrations enterprises demand, would win the unglamorous middle of the market.
They proved the thesis on themselves first. With a team of about five, Avochato used its own platform to text its way to hundreds of customers and seven-figure revenue inside a year. It is the kind of origin story that sounds like marketing until you remember the alternative was paying for ads they couldn't yet afford.
The founding trio. The company stayed small on purpose - roughly sixteen people serving over a thousand businesses.
"Make it easy for organizations to connect with their customers in the most modern and rewarding ways."
// The mission, unchanged since day oneDe Simone, Neale, and Hanson launch Avochato to put business texting in a shared inbox.
A five-person team reaches seven-figure revenue using Avochato itself to acquire customers. Early backing from XSeed Capital.
Amity Ventures leads, with XSeed, ex-Yelp exec Michael Stoppelman, and Thumbtack's Jonathan Swanson joining.
Native Salesforce, Slack, Teams, Okta, and Zapier integrations; HIPAA-compliant messaging; a Salesforce AppExchange listing.
AI agents bring auto-replies, conversation routing, custom bots, and real-time sentiment; RCS adds rich, branded messages.
The core of Avochato is a shared inbox where a conversation stays a conversation no matter how it started. A text, a call, a website chat, an RCS message - they all land in the same thread, assignable to a teammate, visible to the rest, and logged against the customer record. On top of that sits broadcast SMS for campaigns, analytics for response times and sentiment, and Avo AI for the replies and routing nobody wants to do by hand.
Calls, texts, and chats in one collaborative thread - assignable, searchable, and visible to the whole team.
Two-way business texting with broadcasts, auto-responses, and personalization from a real business number.
Rich, branded messages with verified sender identity and interactive content.
Calling and website chat routed into the same inbox, so the history never splits across tools.
Auto-replies, conversation routing, custom bots, and real-time sentiment detection.
REST API plus native Salesforce, Slack, Teams, Okta, and Zapier connections.
Six features, one promise: the customer never has to repeat themselves and the team never loses the thread.
Avochato's quiet trick is that the customer never sees the seams between text, call, and chat - only the business does.
// Why the shared inbox mattersMore than a thousand businesses run on Avochato - across real estate, automotive, healthcare, education, retail, finance, and professional services - and together they've logged millions of two-way conversations. The named customers tell the story in plain numbers: a law firm citing 40x ROI, the realtor Twiddy & Company responding 70% faster, a sales shop hitting 100% lead follow-up.
Read it top to bottom and the business case writes itself: everyone texts, almost everyone wants to, and nobody answers the phone.
"40x ROI." "70% faster responses." "100% lead follow-up." The proof points are short because the product is.
// Customer outcomes, paraphrased from Avochato case studiesIt works because Avochato meets businesses where their software already lives. The Salesforce integration alone means a sales rep can text a lead without ever leaving the CRM, and every message writes itself back to the record. Slack, Teams, Okta, and Zapier handle the rest - the messaging, the identity, the automation - so adoption doesn't require ripping anything out.
The integration roster. Avochato would rather join your stack than ask you to abandon it.
"Promote dialogue, and build the next generation of business communication tools."
// AVOCHATO — THE LONG GAMESMS was the first wave. The next is richer and stranger: RCS turning texts into branded, interactive experiences, and AI agents that can hold the early part of a conversation before a human steps in. Avochato's Avo AI already drafts replies, routes threads, and reads sentiment in real time. The open question for every messaging company is the same - how much of the conversation should a machine handle, and how do you keep it human when it counts.
Avochato's answer fits its whole personality: let the AI handle the repetitive opening, keep a person in the inbox for the moment that matters, and never lose the thread between them. For a company that bet a decade ago that businesses would have to learn to text back, the bet now is that they'll have to learn to do it at machine speed without sounding like a machine.
The first bet was that customers would rather text. The next is that they'll forgive a business for letting AI text first - if a human is still watching.
// The wager for the decade aheadBack to that customer, still mid-sentence. A decade ago their message would have vanished into a personal phone or a dead voicemail. Today it lands in a shared inbox, tagged to their history, maybe answered by AI in the first second and a person in the next. Same text, same tap, same send. The difference is that now, somewhere, a business actually answers.
Funding, revenue, and team-size figures are approximate, drawn from public sources and may be dated.