Trusted by 10,000+ B2C businesses to scale customer chats, calls & campaigns.
Somewhere right now, a woman in São Paulo is asking a car dealership about a used hatchback on WhatsApp. A traveler in Dubai is messaging a clinic on Instagram. A parent in Jakarta is booking a tuition class over LINE. None of them will open an email about it. All three of those conversations - and roughly 2 billion more every quarter - can run through the same piece of software: respond.io.
respond.io is a customer conversation management platform. In plain terms, it takes the dozen or so messaging apps a business gets pinged on - WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, LINE, Telegram, WeChat, web chat, plus email and phone calls - and drops every one of those threads into a single inbox. Then it adds the parts a growing company needs to actually make money from all that chatter: AI agents that reply around the clock, automation that routes and follows up, and a built-in CRM that remembers who said what.
The company was founded in 2017, though not under this name and not in this city. It started as Rocketbots, an AI chatbot outfit in Hong Kong, built by three founders with an unusually global mix of backgrounds. In 2019 they rebranded to respond.io and moved the headquarters to Kuala Lumpur. That relocation reads like a footnote until you look at the map of where the customers ended up.
Most software companies are built for the United States first and the world second. respond.io did it backwards. Its revenue is spread across regions where messaging apps, not inboxes, are the default way people talk to businesses: Asia-Pacific, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. North America and Western Europe together make up the smallest slice - and it is the slice the company is only now moving to capture.
This is the whole thesis in one line: build the tools for where customer attention actually lives. In much of the world, a business WhatsApp message gets read within minutes. A marketing email, if it arrives at all, waits in a tab nobody clicks. respond.io picked the channels that win, and picked the countries where they win hardest.
"If I just look at the numbers, every day that AI becomes more prominent, we grow faster."
Gerardo Salandra, Co-founder & CEOThe typical respond.io customer is a mid-market B2C business - somewhere between 200 and 10,000 employees - in a sector that lives or dies on high volumes of inbound chats: healthcare, automotive, retail, education, travel. Think a chain of dental clinics, a car dealer group, an e-commerce brand running flash sales, a network of language schools. These are companies with too many conversations for a shared phone and not enough budget for a bloated call center.
The logo wall runs bigger than that, too. respond.io counts Toyota, Subway, British Airways, Radisson, Hertz and Decathlon among the names routing customer messages through the platform. In total, more than 10,000 businesses across 180-plus countries use it.
Here is the mess respond.io cleans up. A modern business fields customers on WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, a TikTok comment, a Messenger ping, the web chat widget, and the odd phone call - often about the same order. Each app has its own login. Agents copy-paste between tabs. Leads fall through cracks. Nobody can tell you, at the end of the week, which channel actually sold anything.
respond.io's answer is to merge the lot into one thread per customer. A WhatsApp voice call, a Messenger message and an email now sit in the same conversation, attached to the same contact record. From there, automation assigns the chat to the right person, the AI answers the repetitive 3 a.m. questions, and the analytics finally tie a message back to a sale.
Plenty of tools promise an omnichannel inbox. What sets respond.io apart is less a feature and more a stance. Most software charges per human seat. In an era where AI agents do the work of those humans, per-seat pricing quietly eats itself - the better the AI, the fewer seats, the less revenue. Salandra has been blunt about avoiding that trap.
"When fewer humans use your product, they make less money. But we don't charge like that."
Gerardo Salandra, Co-founder & CEOBy tying pricing to conversation volume rather than headcount, respond.io grows as its customers' messaging grows - and as AI handles more of it, not less. There is a second, quieter advantage: age. The company has been building messaging tools since 2017, which is why Meta and TikTok treat it as a partner and hand it early access to new business-messaging features. Nine years in this niche is a moat that a fresh AI wrapper cannot buy.
Inside the platform, the pieces fit together like a workshop. The Omnichannel Inbox is the bench where every conversation lands. AI Agents greet customers, qualify leads, answer FAQs, recommend products, manage bookings and escalate the hard cases to a human - in multiple languages, at any hour. Workflow Automation handles the plumbing: routing, follow-ups, assignment rules. Broadcasts push promotional and transactional campaigns, including WhatsApp blasts. Native calling and VoIP mean a phone call sits in the same thread as the chat. And a built-in CRM plus analytics keeps the contact history and finally answers the "which channel made money" question.
For a clinic, that means an AI booking appointments overnight. For a retailer, a broadcast that recovers abandoned carts over WhatsApp. For a car dealer, a single agent view of a buyer who started on TikTok, moved to Messenger and finished on a call.
In June 2026, respond.io raised a $62.5 million Series B led by Camber Partners, with Endeavor Catalyst and existing backers joining. It followed a $7 million Series A from Headline Asia in 2022 and a $1.8 million pre-Series A in 2019. What makes the round notable is the shape of the business behind it: around $35 million in annual recurring revenue, 169% year-over-year growth, and - the rare part - roughly 30% profit margin. This is a company that grew fast without lighting its cash on fire.
The plan for the new money is unusual for a company its size: rather than only hire and advertise, respond.io intends to buy - bolt-on technology and teams with established customer bases in Europe and North America, to shortcut its way into the markets it deliberately skipped. Salandra has said out loud that he wants a Nasdaq listing, and to get there while staying disciplined.
Gerardo Salandra is a Salvadoran of Italian descent who grew up attending a German school in El Salvador and speaks four languages. He studied international business in Germany, took an MBA in Hong Kong, and worked on AI and automation at IBM and Google before starting the company. He was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia in 2020. His co-founders, Hassan Ahmed and Iaroslav Kudritskiy, round out a team whose home countries span three continents - fitting, for a company selling to 180 of them.
respond.io went to Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia first. North America is one of its last stops, not its first.
respond.io sits in the crowded lane of business messaging and customer conversation software, alongside Twilio, Sinch, Intercom, Zendesk, Freshworks, Gupshup and a swarm of WhatsApp-first startups. Its wedge is specific: deep on the messaging and voice channels that dominate outside the US, profitable rather than venture-subsidized, and priced for an AI-heavy future. In a category where most players chased the enterprise inbox in San Francisco, respond.io built the one for the phone in everyone else's pocket - and got to $35 million in recurring revenue doing it.