[Funding alert] BiteSpeed raises $275K in seed round led by Whiteboard Capital

BiteSpeed, the Gurugram-based conversational commerce platform for ecommerce brands on Shopify, has raised $275,000 seed funding led by Whiteboard Capital. With this round of funding, BiteSpeed is looking to expand its engineering team and further develop its product.

The round also saw participation from First Cheque, Upsparks, and First Principles, along with marquee angel investors including Livspace Co-founder Ramakant Sharma; Kiran Vasireddy, ex-COO and SVP, Paytm; Anand Rajaram, ex-Director of Product, Hubspot; Dr Ritesh Malik, Founder and CEO, Innov8; Krishnan Menon, Founder and CEO, Bukukas; Harsh Pokharna, Founder and CEO, OkCredit; Gaurav Sharma, Founder and CEO, JustCall and SaaSLabs; Abhinay Peddisetty, Co-founder, BukuWarung; Farooq Adam, Co-founder, Fynd, Harsh Shah, Co-founder, Fynd; Rishabh Kaul Co-founder, Belong; Sweta Rau, angel investor; Gaurav Mandlecha, Growth, Airmeet; and Archana Priyadarshini, Managing Partner, PointOne Capital.

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Commenting on the funding, Vinayak Aggarwal, Founder and CEO, BiteSpeed, said, in a press statement shared by the company, “Ecommerce and direct-to-consumer brands have traditionally relied on email marketing as the default way of engaging with their customers. But email is impersonal, one-way, and saturated. BiteSpeed’s conversational commerce stack is helping ecommerce brands embrace chat as the new way of selling to their customers.”

Founded in 2019 by Vinayak and other founding team members Kshitij Abhishek and Apoorv Sadana, BiteSpeed was built out of their dorm rooms at BITS Pilani. The startup helps ecommerce brands on Shopify move away from impersonal marketing emails and use everyday chat apps like FB Messenger and WhatsApp to sell to their customers. 

The company said that within a year of launching the product, BiteSpeed has organically attracted 1,200+ ecommerce brands on Shopify as customers in over 50 countries. 

Anshu Prasher, General Partner of Whiteboard Capital said, “We have been evaluating various technology platforms helping ecommerce brands with their marketing initiatives and helping with RoI improvements. BiteSpeed is an interesting tool with many possibilities as we scale our product proposition and add more features with very strong early traction. We are excited about the growth prospects and happy to be early partners in the journey with Vinayak and team.”