whatsapp-automation
(7)
Sidney Rema
Sidney Rema is the co-founder and CEO of Sanifu (YC S22), a Nairobi-based startup that uses AI to pull sales orders out of emails, WhatsApp messages, PDFs and even handwritten notes and drops them straight into ERP systems. A University of Nairobi medical student who kept building companies instead of finishing his degree, Rema spent years in small-business banking and payments before co-founding Sanifu with Phelix Juma and Bernard Momanyi. The company grew out of Patika, a marketplace the team started as a food-ordering app called MealTime, and now works with African manufacturers and distributors to cut order processing from minutes to seconds.
Palomma
Palomma is a Medellin-based fintech building an AI-native banking platform for real estate in Latin America, starting with rent. It deploys AI agents that handle leasing, sales, and collections for property managers across WhatsApp, SMS, and phone calls 24/7, then layers on payment collection and disbursement to own the flow of rent and monetize it through credit and insurance products. Founded in the Y Combinator Winter 2023 batch, the company originally launched as a frictionless Pay-by-Bank API for LatAm merchants before pivoting to real estate.
Kata.ai
Kata.ai is an Indonesian conversational AI company that builds NLP and generative-AI chatbots and AI agents for enterprises. Founded in 2016 out of the earlier YesBoss assistant, its Kata Platform and product suite (KataCX, AI call agents, AI commerce, recruitment and loyalty tools) power customer service, marketing, sales and HR automation across WhatsApp and other channels. It serves 200+ enterprise and government clients in banking, telco, FMCG, healthcare and retail, with strength in Bahasa Indonesia language understanding.
Manychat
Manychat is a no-code chat marketing platform that lets businesses and creators automate conversations across Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, TikTok, SMS and email. Built around a visual drag-and-drop Flow Builder, it turns DMs, comments and messages into automated lead capture, sales and support flows. Founded in 2015 and now used by roughly 1.5 million customers in 170+ countries, Manychat sends billions of messages a year and has driven more than $10 billion in user sales. In 2025 it raised $140M led by Summit Partners to push deeper into AI-driven customer engagement.
Verloop.io
Verloop.io is a Bengaluru-based conversational AI platform that automates customer support, sales, and marketing conversations across chat and voice. Founded in 2015 by Gaurav Singh, it builds AI-powered chatbots and voice agents that handle inbound and outbound interactions in 80+ languages for unicorns and Fortune 500 companies across India, Southeast Asia, MENA, and the US. In July 2026 it was acquired by Mukesh Bansal-led Nurix AI to form a combined voice-and-chat automation platform handling more than 20 million customer interactions a month.
MiChamba
MiChamba is a Mexico-founded startup that turns WhatsApp into an operational management platform for frontline and deskless teams across Latin America and the US Hispanic market. Instead of forcing workers onto a new app, it layers AI agents - led by an assistant named MarIA - on top of the messaging tool people already use, converting informal chats into trackable tasks, reports, and productivity data. It raised a $2.25M pre-seed round in 2025 and counts Hilton, Pemex, and Repsol among 50+ customers in construction, hospitality, logistics, and industrial sectors.
Ricardo Flores
Ricardo Flores is the co-founder and CEO of MiChamba, a startup that turns WhatsApp into an AI-powered management platform for deskless teams in construction, logistics, hospitality, and industrial services across Latin America. A kid who worked scorching El Paso roofs before heading to Georgetown and Wall Street, he left finance and an early seat at fintech Wealth.com to build software for the blue-collar workforce he came from. Less than a year after launch, MiChamba raised a $2.25M pre-seed led by Wollef and signed names like Pemex, Hilton, and Repsol, betting that for the 3 billion people who run their work lives on WhatsApp, management should live there too.