chat-banking
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Clickatell
Clickatell is a chat commerce and messaging platform that helps brands talk to and transact with customers across SMS, WhatsApp and other channels. Founded in 2000 in Cape Town, it was the first company to wire businesses on the internet to consumers on mobile phones using SMS in four lines of code. Twenty-five years later it powers chat banking, tokenized WhatsApp payments and Chat-2-Pay with Visa for over 10,000 customers worldwide.
Pieter de Villiers
Pieter de Villiers is the Co-Founder and CEO of Clickatell, the company that invented the world's first SMS API in 2000 with four lines of code and went on to pioneer chat banking and chat commerce globally. Based in Stellenbosch, South Africa, he led Clickatell to become the first African startup backed by Sequoia Capital, raised over $118 million in total funding, and built a platform that processes roughly 9 billion messages monthly for more than 10,000 enterprise clients across 220+ countries. He also chairs SiMODiSA, a non-profit focused on digital skills development and startup acceleration in Africa.