# tawk.to vs Kustomer

> A look at two opposite bets on customer messaging. tawk.to, founded in 2013 by Robert D'Assisi and Shankar Karuppiah, gave away live chat for free, took no venture capital, and became the most-installed live chat tool on the web with roughly 20% market share and 1.7 billion monthly interactions. Kustomer, founded in 2015 by Brad Birnbaum and Jeremy Suriel, raised more than $170M, sold to Meta for about $1B in 2020, was written down to a $250M valuation when Meta spun it out in 2023, and is now rebuilding as an AI-first CRM. Same industry, two philosophies about how you win it.

## Achievements

- tawk.to: #1 most widely used live chat application worldwide with roughly 20% market share
- tawk.to: 1.7+ billion people interact with a tawk.to widget each month
- tawk.to: built a market lead with no venture capital and no Silicon Valley base
- Kustomer: sold to Meta for a reported $1 billion in 2020
- Kustomer: raised more than $170M from Battery, Redpoint, Boldstart and others
- Kustomer: founders previously built Assistly, acquired by Salesforce and rebranded as Desk.com

## Latest updates

- **2023-05** — Kustomer spun out of Meta as a standalone company at ~$250M with $60M in fresh funding from its original backers.
- **2026-08** — tawk.to continues as the most-installed live chat product on the web; Kustomer positions itself as an AI-powered CRM for support teams.

## Links

- Website: https://www.tawk.to/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tawk-to
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/tawkto
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/tawkto
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tawk.to/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tawk.to

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Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-08-07