Forget your typical business chatbot! Check out WATI. This Hong Kong and Malaysia-headquartered startup makes it easy to acquire, support and engage your customers over WhatsApp.

Now, they've just raised a $23M Series B led by Tiger Global to take their solution to more markets — including SEA!

• Founded in 2019, they have over 6,000 customers in 78 countries.
• Customers include Grab, Gojek, TikTok, Oppo and more!

Investor check. Sequoia Capital India & Southeast Asia, and new investors DST Global Partners and Shopify also joined in!

• This is Shopify's first investment in a startup operating in SEA.
• Their last round was an $8.3M Series A.

‍

🧐 Why it matters

Over 2B people globally use WhatsApp to communicate! So, businesses want to speak to customers where they are — WhatsApp.

The problem? The WhatsApp for Business API helps businesses speak to customers on WA. It's good for businesses that are just starting out, but Whatsapp's API isn't enough once they grow and scale!

• At that point, these businesses need more power, features and integrations.

‍

💪🏼 Instead, use WATI!

Their CRM software is basically WhatsApp for Business but made more scalable and effective! Save time, do more and make more $$$.

• It's built on top of the WhatsApp for Business API as an official partner.
• Use it for marketing campaigns, sales and customer support.

No-code. Create a WhatsApp chatbot for your business with zero code in minutes.

Go team! Have a shared team WA inbox that makes it easy to collaborate and assign individual conversations to agents — no more confusion about who should reply to what.

Do the (previously) impossible. Send bulk messages to all your customers about a discount. Or, create personalized notifications based on data or triggers like when a customer abandons their cart. You can even automate workflows!

• Other features include segmenting users, saving templated messages, automating canned responses and more.

Integrate, integrate! With just a few clicks, integrate with tons of e-commerce platforms and tools like Shopify, WooCommerce, Zapier, Google Sheets, Hubspot and CRMs!

‍

🌏 SEA, we're coming for you

With the $$$, they'll be scaling in their biggest current market, India and are prepping to expand across SEA and LatAm. Oh, and they'll also be hiring and doubling down on their product stack for low-code automation.