Chatbots and other types of AI agents – and companies that build them – may look like a penny of a dozen today. But the truth is that, for companies and consumers, some can be infinitely more useful (and perhaps Less dystopian) than the others. Today, a startup that has built a prosperous business around this concept announces a major growth lap to extend its business. MaverchatWho offers brands a tool to manage and automate conversations and commitment to several messaging channels, won $ 140 million led by Summit Partners.
Funding arrives on strong growth for the startup. ManyChat now has around 1.5 million customers in 170 countries, with the list of customers, including Nike, the New York Times and Yahoo (the current owner of Techcrunch) as well as individual creators and much smaller outfits.
The CEO and co-founder Mike Yan said that Manyhat sent “billions” of messages per year on behalf of these users on Tiktok, Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger and other cat platforms. The plan will be to use this last B series financing cycle both to invest in R&D – in particular bringing more AI in the platform – as well as to stimulate sales, marketing and company support on a global scale.
Especially for a startup these days, ManyChat is mainly profitable – mainly, because as Yan describes, “we always operate at the forefront of the very rupture.”
Since the launch of a decade in 2015, he has only collected about 23 million dollars, mainly in this series of $ 18 million in 2019, led by Bessemer with the participation of Flint Capital. (ManyChat has not revealed what other investors are in this last round beyond detailed For series A.
From Telegram to Instagram
The ManyChat trajectory reflects both the rise of messaging applications based on smartphones in the past decade, as well as the growing opportunity around tools to help companies take advantage of this support in a better way.
In 2015, the reception box by email began to make a donation to become a support for spam, tired and too used for companies that seek to use it for marketing.
Yan was getting out of the back of a failed social application, and himself was a telegram user, one of a growing population of consumers using messaging applications for basic communications. When Telegram opened his APIs, the bulb of the inspiration took place for him and his co-founder Anton Morin.
“Telegram was in fact one of the first Western messaging applications to open its APIs,” he recalls. “As Telegram users ourselves, and we have seen clear work to do.” Companies used an email to connect to users, he said, but it was not that users spent time. “They should use messaging applications to connect with customers, this is where the new wave of communication occurs. This is where the new consumer is. ”
He and Gorin therefore built the first iteration of Manyhat as a tool for creating cats for companies on Telegram. He picked up enough traction to bring them into the accelerator of 500 startups.
Then, when Facebook opened its APIs to Messenger – making its own efforts to build IA chatbots – things really started to take off. As ManyChat increased his series A in 2019, he already reached 350 million users on the platform with billions of messages and an enviable opening rate of 80%.
Additional APIs opening up to other meta-owners platforms as well as Tiktok have increased this growth. Users can always market on Telegram also, Yan said, although these days, just a small percentage of his traffic. For the record, Instagram is by far the most committed and most active platform for the company today, Yan said.
The ManyChat Foundation and a large part of its growth preceded the rise in generative AI and the urgency of IA chatbots such as the Anthropic Claude, Openai Chatpt and Google Gemini, among others. In fact, the previous descriptions of the product presented how it provided a “intelligent automation and personal awareness mixture” to customers, who used its platform without code to create chatbots to develop social subscribers, collect email addresses, respond to comments and configure flows via DM links to ask for products or more information on something.
The anchoring of his product by encouraging other actions, said Yan, this is what distinguishes him from most chatbots on the market at the moment, including most Genai chatbots.
Sophia Popova, the partner of the summit who led the investment and joins the startup board of directors, believes that the ManyChat approach to build a layer of engagement that has been successful so far in fact in a solid bet for the next wave of activity on messaging platforms.
“Our thesis depends on a greater proportion of dollars in trade passing through social messaging applications,” she said in an interview. “You must always be sure and engage 24/7. This is what customers are waiting for and Manyhat hits the highlight on their heads. ” On the other hand, she said, when we consider the DNA of IA chatbots – at least what is on the market today – “very few of them are intended to personalize the conversation in a way that leads to the conversion to income.”
If you want an assistance chatbot, there are “myriades” tools, but in fact very few that are committed to selling or provoking other responses from users of the way Manyhat has done, she added.
However, given the rate of development – and the motivation that many AI startups must generate income to compensate for their huge cash burns – this is a gap that may not be there for a long time, one of the reasons why Manyhat works to constitute more AI features to improve its offer.
