One of the world’s chat commerce leaders, Clickatell has secured a whopping $91million funding to expand into the United State of America market and same time activate its product.
Announcing this in a statement, the company that powers businesses to connect, interact and transact with consumers anytime, anywhere in chat said the funding was sourced from Arrowroot Capital, Kennedy Lewis Investment Management, Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, Endeavor Global and Harvest, making them their investors.
The statement noted that Clickatell, which has delivered double-digit profitable growth for several years, will use the Series C capital to scale and expand three key areas: (i) Accelerated development and innovation of the Chat Commerce offering, (ii) Expansion of its footprint in the U.S., and (iii) Scaling of sales and marketing efforts on the back of growing demand from leading brands.
The new capital will also allow the company to significantly grow its engineering skills. It has already earmarked over 200 positions with a strong focus on boosting its African skills complement in the coming months.
Speaking on the finding, Pieter de Villiers, Co-Founder and CEO at Clickatell said “We look forward to working with businesses and financial institutions across the continent to enable Chat Commerce, the future of digital commerce and engagement. Soon, every consumer in Africa will engage family and friends via chat plus connect, interact and transact with the brands they love through their favorite chat platform.”
He argued that in 2019, Clickatell was the first to launch chat banking, bringing banking services functionality to chat channels. Our successes would not be possible without the trust and collaboration of our customers, some of Africa’s largest and most successful companies in the world.
Clickatell’s platform has been recognized as a global leader in powering mobile messaging/ CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) and payments within the chat. Clickatell processed more than 30 billion interactions, and 2 billion commerce transactions during the COVID-19 period alone as it enabled customer-centric brands to connect, interact and transact with their customers wherever they were sheltering in place during the pandemic.
With a massive $80+ billion Total Addressable Market (TAM), the Chat Commerce market is viewed as the third big wave of digital commerce, following the eCommerce and App Commerce markets. Chat is the largest digital platform in the world, with 7.7 billion users compared to 4.7 billion internet users, making it next to impossible for businesses to operate without communicating and transacting with consumers in chat channels. Chat Commerce enables businesses to easily facilitate significantly improved customer experiences through chat, with the added benefit of being far more efficient for customers and operational costs. Clickatell is uniquely positioned to capitalise on the intersection between communications (CPaaS, CCaaS) and commerce (digital payments) – offering a complete end-to-end Chat Commerce Platform.
Clickatell serves more than 10,000 customers, many of which are Fortune 500 companies and leading global brands such as Coca-Cola, Deloitte, GT Bank, Booking.com, GoDaddy, IKEA, Novartis, Standard Bank, Tangerine, Telegram, US Foods, Visa, Zipcar, Capitec and others. Clickatell’s low / no-code, feature-rich Chat Commerce orchestration capability includes assisted (chat desk) and unassisted (bots) chat and secure payments capability in its recently launched Chat 2 Pay offering.