Manychat taps $140M to boost its business messaging platform with AI

Summary

Chatbots and other kinds of AI agents — and the companies that build them — may feel like a dime a dozen these days. But the truth is that, for both businesses and consumers, some may be infinitely more useful (and perhaps less dystopian) than others. Today, a startup that’s built a successful business around that concept is announcing a major growth round to expand its business. Manychat, which provides brands with a tool for managing and automating conversations and engagement across multiple messaging channels, has picked up $140 million led by Summit Partners. The funding is coming on the heels of strong growth for the startup. Manychat today has around 1.5 million customers across 170 countries, with the client list including the likes of Nike, the New York Times and Yahoo (the current owner of TechCrunch) as well as individual creators and much smaller outfits. CEO and co-founder Mike Yan said Manychat sends “billions” of messages annually on behalf of these users across TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and other chat platforms. The plan will be to use this latest Series B round of funding both to invest in R&D — in particular bringing more AI into the platform — as well as to boost the company’s sales, marketing and support globally. Notably for a startup these days, Manychat is mostly profitable — mostly, because as Yan describes it, “We always operate on the edge of being kind of break even.” Since launching a decade back in 2015, it has only raised around $23 million, mostly from this $18 million Series A round in 2019 led by Bessemer with participation from Flint Capital. (Manychat did not disclose what other investors are in this latest round beyond Summit.) The company is not giving out a valuation but it’s likely to be considerably higher than the modest $58 million post-money valuation PitchBook detailed for the Series A. From Telegram to Instagram Manychat’s trajectory mirrors both the rise of smartphone-based messaging apps over the last decad...