business-messaging
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Ken Yeung Bet the Company on a Simpler Conversation
A former trading-platform engineer learned that sophisticated technology can still be the wrong answer. Wati grew when Ken Yeung and Bianca Ho traded long bank sales cycles for a tool small businesses could understand, buy and use.
respond.io
Trusted by 10,000+ B2C businesses to scale customer chats, calls & campaigns.
Gupshup
It spent nearly two decades sending text messages nobody thought about. Now Gupshup wants those same pipes to carry AI agents that sell, support and close - one conversation at a time.
Avochato
Avochato is a Mill Valley, California SaaS company that gives sales, support, marketing, and operations teams a shared inbox for two-way business conversations over SMS, MMS, RCS, voice, live chat, and WhatsApp. Built for enterprise security and HIPAA compliance, it plugs into Salesforce, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Okta, and Zapier, and layers in AI agents (Avo AI) for auto-replies, routing, and sentiment detection. Founded in 2016 and backed by a $5M Series A, Avochato has helped 1,000+ businesses run millions of customer conversations.
Alex De Simone
Alex De Simone is the CEO and co-founder of Avochato, a business messaging platform that lets sales, support, and operations teams talk to customers over text. He launched it the summer after his first year at Stanford GSB, grew it to seven-figure revenue in under a year, and raised a $5M Series A led by Amity Ventures in 2018. Before Avochato he co-founded Jobr, a Tinder-style job-search app acquired by Monster.com. A self-taught coder with a mechanical engineering background, he turned a side project into a product used by 1,000+ businesses for millions of two-way conversations.