Yellow Messenger Raises $20 Mn Series B Funding Led By Lightspeed

Bengaluru-based conversational AI solutions provider Yellow Messenger has raised $20 Mn in Series B funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lightspeed India Partners.

With this round, the total funding raised by Yellow Messenger is $24 Mn. The company said that it will use the funds to fuel international growth across the US, Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific markets.

In addition, Yellow Messenger will invest further in its product innovation roadmap, including deepening multilingual voice bot capabilities, expanding enterprise integrations, and launching a developer marketplace for virtual assistants.

Founded in 2016 by Raghu Ravinutala, Rashid Khan and Jaya Kishore Reddy, Yellow Messenger deploys artificial intelligence (AI) to help enterprises reach and engage with customers conversationally, and through myriad ways.

Yellow Messenger enables enterprises to automate and orchestrate workflows for customer and employee engagement with minimal human intervention, utilising chatbots across multiple communication channels like Microsoft Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, phone calls, digital assistants and integrated with the enterprise’s existing system of record and system of engagement.

The company claimed that it is powering 30 Mn monthly conversations on chatbots, across more than 100 customers around the globe, including BYJU’S, Domino’s India, Flipkart, etc. The company has also forged deep go-to-market partnerships with Microsoft, TCS, WhatsApp, Facebook and more.

“One in every three companies globally is implementing conversational AI and chatbots—the pull is irreversible. Ever since we met the Yellow Messenger team at our Lightspeed Extreme Entrepreneurs program in 2018, we have seen how the company has taken advantage of this market pull with its rapid time-to-value, transactional platform and multi-language support for global rollouts,” said Dev Khare, Partner, Lightspeed India Partners.

Raghu Ravinutala, CEO and cofounder, Yellow Messenger said that the company has achieved 5X growth in bookings, year over year, since 2017. “This investment will help us scale our operations and speed track the R&D endeavours to service the surge in global demand for automation,” he added.

In response to Covid-19, Yellow Messenger, in partnership with Facebook Messenger, has been appointed by the National Health Authority of India to provide chatbots to several state governments (Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, and Rajasthan) to assist with citizen engagement over WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. The company has also deployed special chatbots for enterprises to deal with employee engagement, customer engagement, and ITSM automation, helping them drive business continuity.

Yellow Messenger competes with the players such as Haptik, which was recently acquired by Reliance Jio. Haptik cofounder and CEO Aakrit Vaish has written that the conversational AI world has come a long way from being just a novelty item for businesses to being a feature with actual, substantial quantitative and qualitative advantages.