Clickatell Raises $91M To Scale Its Chat Commerce Platform And Us Expansion

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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, which is coming a decade after the Sequoia-backed company raised its last round, was led by Arrowroot Capital, with Kennedy Lewis Investment Management, Endeavor Global and Harvest participating. The company claims to have developed one of the world’s first chat banking solutions on WhatsApp via its chat commerce integration with ABSA Bank, one of South Africa’s largest banks.“In many ways, we’ve kind of had to wait for the market to come to us because if you have the first mover, you can also get too far ahead of the pack and find yourself in a desert,” de Villiers said to TechCrunch on the company’s progression from enabling customer engagement via chat to payments. “We had to wait for things like the WhatsApp channel to open up. Since 2020, it has processed over 30 billion interactions and 2 billion commerce transactions, the company said. In 2019, 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. Citing why Clickatell remains private, chief executive de Villiers said the 22-year-old company needed safe funding to test out products “in a sector that is just emerging,” however, he feels pretty confident that Clickatell’s next round would be a public one. For now, Clickatell intends to use the Series C capital to expand its U.S. footprint, scale its sales and marketing efforts and accelerate the development of its chat commerce offering across South Africa and Nigeria.“Clickatell is an inspiring example of how a company from South Africa can pull the future forward. Clickatell claims to have delivered double-digit profitable growth for more than a decade. Founded in 2000, Clickatell is a pioneer in this mobile communications and chat commerce space. Clickatell was the pioneering company that successfully first sent messages from the internet to mobile phones, and today they power some of the biggest names in communications, like WhatsApp,” said Allen Taylor, Endeavor Catalyst managing director in a statement.