chat-commerce
(8)
SleekFlow Turned the Chat Box Into a Checkout Counter
A Singapore-based startup bet that customers would rather buy over WhatsApp than fill out a web form. Five years and 5,000 businesses later, that bet is paying off across Asia and the Gulf.
Vendy
Vendy is a Lagos-founded payment infrastructure company that lets businesses accept payments inside the places people already chat - WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram and AI assistants. Sellers spin up a shop in minutes with a catalog, cart, automated invoicing and checkout, and buyers pay without downloading an app or signing up. Started in Y Combinator's W22 batch, Vendy now positions itself as 'agentic payments infrastructure,' offering a single API across cards, bank transfers, mobile money and USSD, and reports more than 20 million transactions processed for around 2,000 merchants.
Yezza
Yezza is a Malaysian SaaS company (YC W22) that helps small businesses in Southeast Asia sell and operate through WhatsApp. It started as a tool to spin up storefronts inside the messaging app and has grown into an operating system for SMBs - with online stores, WhatsApp forms, broadcasting, invoicing, and industry-specific systems for clinics, dental and other service businesses.
Zbooni
Zbooni is a Dubai-based conversational commerce platform that lets businesses capture orders, send invoices, and accept payments directly inside messaging and social apps like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger. Founded in 2016 by Ramy Assaf and Ashraf Atia, the company champions what it calls cCommerce - selling through the chat window customers already use - and provides merchants a mobile business dashboard, payment links, and its own payment gateway across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt.
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.
Masa Shimizu
Masahiro 'Masa' Shimizu is the Founder & CEO of ZEALS Co., Ltd. and Omakase.ai, the Japanese pioneer of Chat Commerce. He started ZEALS as a Meiji University freshman in 2014 with robots and a mission to 'elevate Japan,' pivoted to chatbots within one month of Facebook opening its Messenger API in 2016, built Japan's #1 social chat commerce platform with 300+ employees and $69M+ raised, and is now taking that same hospitality-first philosophy — what he calls 'Omotenashi' — into voice-powered AI agents for global e-commerce through Omakase.ai.
ZEALS
ZEALS is a Tokyo-born, San Francisco-expanded conversational commerce company building AI-powered chat experiences on LINE, Instagram, and Messenger. Its 'Chat Commerce' platform pairs human conversation designers with generative AI to turn ad clicks and DMs into measurable revenue for global enterprises like Toyota, Shiseido, and Dyson.