[Funding alert] Chatbot startup Yellow Messenger raises $20M in Series B funding

AI chatbot startup Yellow Messenger on Thursday said it raised $20 million in Series B funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lightspeed India Partners.

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The company said it would use the funds to further enhance its product innovation roadmap by deepening multi-lingual voice bot capabilities, expanding enterprise integrations, and launching a developer marketplace for virtual assistants, and fast-track its research and development operations to meet the surge in global demand for automation.

Raghavendra Kumar Ravinutala, chief executive officer and Co-Founder of Yellow Messenger said,

"We’ve seen huge demand for our conversational AI platform since the very beginning, achieving 5X growth in bookings, year over year, since 2017. With rapid advancements in voice tech, AI and multilingual capabilities, our product has consistently offered a truly scalable solution by delivering meaningful and measurable results to enterprises across the globe."

The fundraising will also help Yellow Messenger fuel international growth across the US, Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific markets.

Till date, Yellow Messenger has raised a total of $24 million, with Lightspeed India Partners previously leading a $4 million Series A investment in 2019.

The Bengaluru-based startup offers enterprises intelligent and customisable conversational bots that automate and orchestrate workflows for customers and employees, with minimal human intervention.

Recently, the company teamed up with Facebook Messenger to provide its chatbot technology to some state governments in India, in light of the coronavirus pandemic. The goal of the partnership is to help authorities engage with citizens with over WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

The startup claims it has clocked over 30 million monthly conversations so far, on chatbots across more than 100 global customers, including the likes of Accenture, Bajaj Finance, BYJU'S, Domino's India, Flipkart, Grab, MG Motors, Royal Enfield, Spencer's Retail, Tata AIG, and Xiaomi India.

The company has also forged deep go-to-market partnerships with Microsoft, TCS, WhatsApp and Facebook, among others.

Commenting on the fundraise, Dev Khare, Partner at Lightspeed India said one in every three companies globally is implementing conversational AI and chatbots, and the pull is irreversible.

"Ever since we met the Yellow Messenger team at our Lightspeed Extreme Entrepreneurs program in 2018, we have seen how the company has taken advantage of this market pull with its rapid time-to-value, transactional platform and multi-language support for global rollouts," he added.