Malaysia’s respond.io raises $7M funding led by Headline Asia

Respond.io, a Malaysia-based social to conversational commerce software as a service (SaaS) platform, has closed $7 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by Headline Asia with participation from AltaIR Capital, Smart Partnership Capital, Sterling Oak Group & Calendula Ventures, respond.io said in a statement.

According to the statement, respond.io has grown its revenue 25 times since the previous round and will use the funding to continue its push into large enterprises by extending its extensive suite of integration capabilities, expanding from its home in Asia to build a presence in the Middle East, Europe and Latin America.

“The latest wave of digital commerce innovation was pioneered by small brands using Instagram. It uses social commerce to drive buyers onto tailor-made social accounts and enables consumers to accelerate their purchase decisions through WhatsApp and other messengers,”

“We’ve built a platform that enables multi-national brands to deploy that highly innovative strategy at a scale of a million conversations per day across dozens of teams,” said Gerardo Salandra, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of respond.io.

Founded in 2017 by Gerardo Salandra, Hassan Ahmed & Iaroslav Kudritskiy, respond.io built an omni-channel messaging inbox and found instant success in countries/regions like Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia.

Since then, the firm has introduced advanced analytics, automation and marketing tools built from the ground up for messaging.

It has Enabled over 10,000 businesses, including industry heavyweights like Klook, Decathlon, Abenson, Yoho, Roche, ShareChat & Bigo to leverage the social to conversational commerce revolution.

“We’ve created an incredible infrastructure to service these huge customers – we process over 140 million messages per month,” said Hassan Ahmed Chief Technology Officer at respond.io.

“These metrics are hardly ever made public, but from what I’ve found, this is an industry-leading figure – for instance, it’s at least 10 times more messages than our biggest European competitor Trengo,” he added.

According to the statement, respond.io is also on track to lead the market globally with social to conversational commerce solutions at the world’s largest brands, nationwide retailers, and other enterprise companies.

“From the management team to the business model, respond.io has demonstrated that Hong Kong is a well-recognised international city,” said Lap Man, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Beyond Ventures.

“Respond.io can leverage the uniqueness of the widespread use of various messaging platforms such as Whatsapp, WeChat, Facebook, Telegram, etc. in Hong Kong and initiate the business idea here,” he added.

Beyond Ventures, the Hong Kong-based venture capital firm, was co-founded by Lap Man and Marvin Hung in 2017 with the goal to revitalize and transform Hong Kong’s innovation ecosystem by being the city’s most impactful venture capital firm.

The firm unites venture capital experts and local conglomerates with visionary entrepreneurs, providing start-ups with the capital and guidance they need to thrive.

Since raising its first fund in 2017, Beyond Ventures has successfully invested in and helped develop portfolio companies which include SenseTime, Smartsens, Prenetics, YOHO and HKTaxi (acquired by Uber in 2021).

To date the portfolio has produced four initial public offerings (IPOs) and one trade sale.

Beyond Ventures draws on support from Hong Kong conglomerates including Hop Hing Group, Far East Consortium, Chinney Alliance Group and Chinachem Group, as well as private equity firms Hony Capital and GAW Capital and Hong Kong venture capital firm eGarden.

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