The global chat commerce market is worth an estimated $80 billion and is seen as the third wave of digital commerce after e- commerce and app commerce markets.
As the largest digital platform in the world with more users than the internet, it only makes sense for businesses to communicate and transact with consumers through chat channels.
Clickatell is a pioneer in this space. The company helps businesses communicate with their customers via mobile messaging platforms and today is announcing that it has raised $91 million in a new financing round.
The Series C funding was led by Arrowroot Capital and included Kennedy Lewis Investment Management, Endeavor Global and Harvest.
Clickatell is based in California and has offices in Nigeria and Canada.
Thus, Clickatell became the go-to interface for companies to send messages to their customers, which in turn powered considerable gains in customer engagement via SMS.
Clickatell got a $12 million Series B round of funding from Sequoia Capital and other investors in order to move beyond customer engagement and add payments into one of its numerous offerings.
Clickatell plays in the intersection of the three and helps businesses deploy payments.
Consumers in Nigeria and South Africa can use its platform to find goods and services, make purchases, track orders, and resolve issues with a text or chat.
One of the world's first chat banking solutions was developed by the company through its chat commerce integration with the largest bank in South Africa.
We had to wait for the market to come to us because if you have the first mover, you can get too far ahead of the pack and end up in a desert.
We had to wait for things to open up. Two years ago, we were the first company in the world to launch payments out of chat banking.
Clickatell, in partnership with Visa's fraud management platform, Cybersource, launched chat2Pay to deliver chat commerce and make contact-free payments for businesses in the U.S. The partnership broadens the acceptance of different payment methods outside of physical point-of-sale terminals and redit cards.
Merchants using the platform can send payment links to their customers via text message, and they can then make payments through a payment page.
We believe that chat commerce has the potential to be larger than e- commerce due to the fact that there are more people on chat than on the internet. He said that when Visa thought about the future, and how do they serve their customers across multiple payment instruments, they decided to partner with us.
The partnership has an enormous market opportunity. In the next five years, the market is expected to reach $52 billion. Visa merchants and partners in 190 countries will be able to use the newly-launched platform.
Clickatell claims to have delivered double-digit profitable growth for more than a decade. The company has processed over 30 billion interactions and 2 billion commerce transactions. Clickatell reaches 17 million end customers and up to 1.3 million payments transactions are carried out daily in Nigeria.
The California-based company sought funds to go public in the U.S. and of course, that listing hasn't materialized yet considering its new private capital round. The 22-year-old company needs safe funding to test out products in a sector that is just emerging, according to the executive.
Clickatell will use the Series C capital to expand its US footprint, scale its sales and marketing efforts, and accelerate the development of its chat commerce offering across South Africa and Nigeria.
Clickatell is an example of how a company from South Africa can pull the future forward. Clickatell was the pioneer that first sent messages from the internet to mobile phones, and today they power some of the biggest names in communications, according to Allen Taylor, the managing director of Endeavor Catalyst.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
