whatsapp-business
(22)
Blip puts business on the other end of “hello.”
A Brazilian company built its future around a familiar habit: sending a message. The hard part was getting the business on the other end to remember, respond and finish the job.
Botika Built a Business on the Questions That Wouldn’t Go Away
An Indonesian travel business made booking easier, but customers kept asking for a human. Botika turned those persistent conversations into software for shipping companies, public services and railway stations.
tyntec turns the humble message into serious business
A WhatsApp conversation can sell a jacket. A network signal can help verify a customer. Tyntec has spent two decades connecting those everyday moments to the machinery of mobile telecoms.
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.
Squaretalk
The cloud contact center platform trying to turn every outbound call into a smarter, faster, better-connected conversation - without the enterprise price tag.
respond.io
Trusted by 10,000+ B2C businesses to scale customer chats, calls & campaigns.
Trengo
One inbox for every channel, and AI agents built to handle the conversations nobody wants to answer twice.
Userlike
A student side project in Cologne became the live chat behind Toyota, Nivea and Hermes - and then bet its future on AI that answers before a human has to.
Sinch
The Swedish company you have never heard of sends the one-time passcodes, delivery alerts and marketing texts that reach your phone billions of times a day. This is how Sinch turned invisible infrastructure into a global business.
Gupshup and Yellow.ai Race to Turn India's Chatbots Into Agents
Two of India's best-known conversational AI companies are chasing the same prize from different corners - one built on high-volume messaging, the other on enterprise voice. The gap between a bot that answers and an agent that acts is where the fight is now.
The Chat Box in the Corner Is Now a $2 Billion Fight
Front, Text, respond.io, JivoChat and a handful of rivals turned the little live-chat widget into a real software business. Now AI agents are racing to answer before a human ever reads the message.
Six Live Chat Tools and the Bubble That Runs Your Website
HelpCrunch, WATI, Pure Chat, LivePerson, Rocket.Chat and Provide Support all sell the same small box in the corner of your screen. The differences between them explain how customer support quietly turned into a software industry worth billions.
SleekFlow Wants Your Inbox to Close the Sale, Not Freshworks
The Singapore- and Hong Kong-based conversational commerce startup turned WhatsApp threads into a checkout counter. Now, backed by Tiger Global and Atinum, it is betting AI agents can sell and support in the same breath the incumbents keep separate.
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.
Infobip
How a self-funded SMS gateway from a Croatian fishing town became the plumbing behind hundreds of billions of texts, WhatsApp messages and login codes.
Trengo Bet the Company on WhatsApp Beating Email
The Utrecht startup pulled a dozen messaging channels into one inbox and raised $36 million on a simple hunch - that customers would rather text a business than email it. Now its AI is chasing the 84% of questions nobody wants to answer twice.
Zoho won't buy Trengo - it wired into it instead
The bootstrapped giant that famously refuses to acquire found a quieter way to work with a Dutch omnichannel upstart: an open API, a shared inbox, and a customer record that finally lives in one place.
Why Trengo Keeps Picking Fights With a $1.7B Unicorn
Front raised more than $200 million and a unicorn valuation on the promise of a shared inbox. Trengo, bootstrapped out of Utrecht, decided the future was WhatsApp - and started aiming straight at it.
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.
Brevo
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a Paris-based all-in-one customer engagement platform serving 500,000+ businesses across 180 countries. The platform combines email marketing, SMS, CRM, live chat, and marketing automation under one roof — all priced by email volume rather than contact count. Founded in 2012 by Armand Thiberge, Brevo rebranded from Sendinblue in 2023 to reflect its evolution from an email tool into a full customer lifecycle platform. In December 2025 it achieved unicorn status after raising €500 million in a Series C round led by General Atlantic and Oakley Capital, with a valuation exceeding €1 billion.
Connectly.ai
Connectly is a San Francisco AI startup that turns WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS and RCS threads into a real sales channel. Its Sofia AI agent talks to shoppers in natural language, recommends products, recovers carts, and hands off to humans when needed. The company raised a $20M Series B led by Alibaba in September 2024 and works with retailers and consumer brands across Latin America, the US, and Asia.
Syed Amir Jafri
Syed Amir Jafri is the CEO and co-founder of Eocean, a Pakistan-based CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) company serving 2,000+ enterprises across 180+ countries with SMS, WhatsApp, and Voice APIs. He co-founded Eocean in 2008 with his brother Syed Asif Jafri, bootstrapping the company from a local communications startup into a regional technology leader. He is also co-founder of Kistpay, a fintech platform focused on smartphone financing and digital inclusion in Pakistan. A certified Chief Digital Officer from MIT Sloan Executive Education, Jafri bridges the gap between traditional enterprise communication and emerging AI-driven platforms, with clients including Google, Unilever, HBL, and Careem.