Gupshup announced that it has raised $100 million in a Series F funding round from US-based investor Tiger Global Management. With the help of current funding, its valuation has crossed $1 billion marks. Gupshup was founded in India 15 year ago. It helps business firms to connect with users through texts. Now, Gupshup operations are executed from its San Francisco headquarter.
Gupshup Funding Details
As per the statement released by Gupshup, Tiger Global has invested $100 million in the Series F funding round. Now, the company’s market cap has surged to $1.4 billion.
Gupshup provides the messaging conversation facility to its clients. Till now, more than 100000 organizations and developers have taken the help of the Gupshup platform to connect with their clients. It was 2011 when Gupshup raised $150 million in its last round of funding. The startup helps its clients to send more than 6 billion messages every month.
Tiger Global has closely observed Gupshup operations. The investor has full trust in the future growth of the messaging platform. Talking about the latest investment and the future of Gupshup, John Curtius, a partner at Tiger Global Management, said:
“The growth in business use of messaging and conversational experiences, transforming virtually every customer touchpoint, is an exciting secular trend. Gupshup is uniquely positioned to win in this market with a differentiated product, a clear and sustainable moat, and an experienced team with a proven track record. In addition to its market leadership, Gupshup’s unique combination of scale, growth and profitability attracted us.”
In the first six years of operations in India, Gupshup was popular for its group messaging services. More than 10 millions Indian users took the advantage of Gupshup platform to send cheap messages to one another.
What Gupshup CEO Says About the Past and Future Operations?
While talking about the earlier model in an interview with TechCrunch, Beerud Sheth, co-founder and chief executive of Gupshup, said:
“For that service to work, Gupshup was subsidizing the messages. We were paying the cost to the mobile operators. The idea was that once we scale up, we will put advertisements in those messages. Long story short, we thought as the volume of messages increases, operators will lower their prices, but they didn’t. And also the regulator said we can’t put ads in the messages.”
He further added:
“We were neither able to subsidize the messages, nor monetize our user base. But we had all of this advanced technology for high-performance messaging. So we switched from the consumer model to the enterprise model. So we started to serve banks, e-commerce firms, and airlines that need to send high-level messages and can afford to pay for it.”
Sheth is also the co-founder of freelance workplace Elance, which started in 1998.
With the help of its advanced Artificial Intelligence(AI) technology, Gupshup has developed conversational bots to help businesses. The clients can also run their WhatsApp channels setup and run by Gupshup.
Currently, Gupshup has valuable clients from all business areas including travel, hospitality, e-commerce, and banking. The company is helping these clients to exchange sensitive information like one time passwords, transactional details etc.
Talking about the kind of messages Gupshup is sending, Sheth said:
“These are not advertising or promotional messages. These are core service information.”
With the current funding, Gupshup plans to attract more customers with new offerings.
Sheth said:
“Gupshup’s mission is to build the tools that help businesses better engage customers through mobile messaging and conversational experiences. As we work towards our mission, we are delighted with this investment from Tiger Global, given its incredible track record of making big, bold, successful bets on innovative, category-defining companies worldwide.”
