Startups tend to raise capital early and often. That isn’t how we do it at respond.io. We’ve been focused on organic growth since our inception in 2017, prioritizing our product and content to solve the biggest problems in business messaging. If you’ve followed our journey from the start or found us through our blog, you’ll know this firsthand.

We’ve taken the time to build respond.io properly

Our approach to raising capital is fundstrapping, a mix of bootstrapping and fundraising. When decisions are dictated by money — or the lack of it — ideology or growth suffer. Combining both was a sweet spot for us.

We started respond.io in a tiny office with few resources, but we fully believed in the vision of a product that would transition businesses from the email era to conduct marketing, sales and support at scale over instant messaging. Since we were focused on the product rather than profits, we could:

• Be as disruptive as we wanted, experimenting with new ideas in an untapped market
• Push efficiency and creativity to the limit; having less also forced us to make the most of available resources
• Build our platform meticulously, going back to the drawing board as many times as necessary to get it right

Our seed and pre-series A funding made it possible for us to make mistakes (lots of them!) and take the time to correct them. We have to thank our early customers for this. As a result, respond.io is now on solid ground with a deep understanding of customers’ real-world needs.

We’ve been pushing the accelerator on innovation

Most companies take their foot off the pedal when they reach a certain size and focus on retention, extracting more revenue from existing customers while slowing down on value generation.

That’s not the respond.io way. We have empowered more than 10,000 businesses, including industry heavyweights like Abenson, Roche and ShareChat, to join the conversational commerce revolution and process over 140 million messages a month. And we’re still gunning for innovation to increase the value we provide every day.

As a pioneer in the messaging landscape, we’re determined to keep our lead. All our decisions are data- and customer-driven. Respond.io has evolved from an omnichannel inbox to a full tech stack with third-party integration support, an automation engine and advanced analytics.

Meanwhile, recent upgrades like our adoption of WhatsApp Cloud API, localization of our platform in Spanish and a Monthly Active Contacts pricing model (a first in our industry) are examples of how much your feedback matters to us.

Thanks to this, we’ve grown our revenue 25X since our last round of funding. Our track record in product and content-led growth proves we know exactly where you need to go and how to get you there. In short, this rocket is ready for launch.

We’re set to scale with Series A funding

Our goal has always been to design a superlative product with scalable repeatable growth. To that end, we’re happy to announce that we’ve raised $7 million in Series A funding, led by Headline Asia with participation from AltaIR Capital, Smart Partnership Capital, Sterling Oak Group and Calendula Ventures.

It’s important to us that our investors are like-minded and support our focus on long-term value generation for all stakeholders, especially our customers. We were fortunate to find them this round and have charted an ambitious roadmap for the next chapter of our journey.

We’re going to serve you better

You have seen us produce tools like Contact Merge, which intuitively creates a single customer story across channels, and grow Workflows into one of the most powerful and flexible automation builders in the market.

Imagine what we can do with this injection of funds. Expect to see more highly sophisticated features and solutions, as well as continuous improvements to our infrastructure.

We’re going to support you better

By the end of 2022, we’d have tripled the size of our team to 100 Responders compared to the same time last year. Not only are we investing in hiring the best tech talents, but we’re also looking to grow our support team to create an exceptional customer experience for you.

This includes more dedicated Customer Success Managers for Enterprise clients and more agents covering a wider range of shifts in multiple languages for our global clients.

We’re going to be closer to you

Speaking of global clients, we’re going to be expanding in the Middle East, Europe and Latin America; regions where messaging apps absolutely dominate the communication landscape but few business solutions exist.

Right now, we’re one of the best-kept secrets in the business messaging world as most of our clients found us while looking for solutions to specific problems. In this next chapter, we're going to bring business messaging into the mainstream.

While we are a product of our generation, born into and molded by the messaging world, it is a world that is rapidly evolving. This isn’t a challenge for us; it’s an opportunity. As we move out of our startup phase and into our growth phase, we thank you for crossing this milestone with us. Here’s to many more ahead.