From a Shopify side project to powering $1B in GMV: The BiteSpeed story

For millions of online shoppers today, the path to checkout no longer begins on a website; it starts in a chat window or a WhatsApp message about an abandoned cart or an Instagram DM advertisement. As conversations replace clicks, ecommerce brands are scrambling to keep up.

BiteSpeed wants to be the system that runs all of it.

Founded by Vinayak Aggarwal in 2019, Bengaluru-based BiteSpeed is a customer engagement platform that helps ecommerce brands automate marketing, support, and sales across WhatsApp, Instagram, email, SMS, and voice, without increasing ad spend. The goal is to turn fragmented customer conversations into a single, trackable revenue engine.

WhatsApp’s transformation from a personal chat app to a business backbone has been rapid. More than 200 million businesses now use WhatsApp Business globally, and the broader conversational commerce market was valued at $11.26 billion in 2025, with projections suggesting it could grow to $22.57 billion by 2031. But when WhatsApp Business launched in India in 2018, most brands used it narrowly – for basic customer support or order confirmations. 

Aggarwal, then a manufacturing engineering student at BITS Pilani, saw a bigger opportunity. “Chatbots were appearing on WhatsApp and Messenger, but no one was really using them to market products or drive sales at scale,” he says. 

He built a marketing automation tool for messaging platforms and launched it on Shopify's app store. The response was immediate: within a month, the product had thousands of installations and more than 100 reviews. That early traction became the foundation for BiteSpeed.

What BiteSpeed does

Today, BiteSpeed serves as a unified customer engagement platform for ecommerce brands. It integrates with Shopify and other ecommerce backends, allowing brands to manage marketing campaigns, customer support, and sales conversations across channels - from a single dashboard.

The startup aimed to solve the problem of attribution chaos. It began as a WhatsApp-only tool, and by 2022 had expanded into a unified platform. “If you're using separate tools for WhatsApp, email, and SMS, every platform claims credit for the sale," Aggarwal says. "You can't tell which channel actually worked." 

Over the past year, the startup has shifted its focus to AI-led features: chat automation, personalisation features, and voice agents layered on top of its core system. 

On the marketing side, BiteSpeed helps brands re-engage shoppers who drop off before purchasing. It captures contact details from website visitors and retargets them across channels. An abandoned cart might trigger a WhatsApp message with product details and a discount offer. 

The platform segments customers based on behaviour and intent. “We can identify who's likely to buy during a Diwali sale,” Aggarwal says. The AI can automatically create personalised journeys for each product, generating unique messages and creatives at scale.

For customer support, the startup brings queries from email, WhatsApp, social media, and voice into a single inbox. Chatbots handle routine questions, while AI-powered voice agents manage after-hours support with instant callbacks. 

"When a customer asks, 'Where is my order?', the bot pulls real-time data from logistics partners, Shopify, and internal tools,” Aggarwal explains. The bots are trained on each brand's catalogue, FAQs, and support history, allowing them to answer with context. 

The same infrastructure powers conversational commerce. Customers can browse, ask questions, and complete purchases directly on WhatsApp or Instagram, without visiting a website. Payments happen in-app, and the bot carries context across the journey. 

“It already knows your past purchases and the brand's policies," Aggarwal says. “You’re not starting from scratch every time.”

The technology stack: AI-powered conversations

To power these solutions, BiteSpeed builds on existing large language models, primarily OpenAI and other leading providers, re-engineering them for ecommerce use cases. 

Several layers sit between the raw models and customer conversations: structured prompting to guide behaviour, guardrails to reduce hallucinations, quality evaluation systems that monitor nearly a million voice calls each month, and custom frameworks that adapt responses to a brand’s tone and style. 

“Perfect AI actually sounds unnatural,” Aggarwal says. "Real people hesitate, use regional expressions, switch between conversational Hindi and English. Our voice agents are programmed to sound like someone you'd actually talk to, not a bot reading a script."

BiteSpeed’s earlier calling CRM proved critical in shaping the voice product. Data showed that immediate callbacks after cart abandonment work best, many purchases happen evenings and weekends when human teams are offline, and conversational tone outperforms robotic precision. These insights informed a system that now connects seamlessly with Shopify, payment gateways, and logistics providers via standard APIs.

On the data front, brands control exactly what information feeds into their bots through a secure interface. All data remains encrypted and siloed, with systems communicating directly as needed - without exposing underlying data flows to individual users. 

The business model

That infrastructure now supports more than 6,000 ecommerce and D2C brands across 50+ countries. BiteSpeed’s client list includes Indian brands like Dot & Key, Bombay Shaving Company, Mokobara, mCaffeine, Zouk, Ugaoo, Trident, and Fujifilm Instax.

Pricing follows a hybrid model: a monthly SaaS subscription based on plan, and usage-based charges across WhatsApp, email, SMS, and voice. This structure scales with volume–smaller brands can choose affordable plans while larger brands pay proportionally more as traffic increases. 

“Monthly costs range from a few hundred dollars for smaller brands to several thousand, depending on scale and usage,” Aggarwal says. 

The model has fuelled rapid growth. BiteSpeed now powers approximately $1 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) across its customer base and directly drives $200-250 million in annual sales, growing 40-50% year on year. "On average, we contribute 20-25% of a brand's total sales - incremental sales without additional ad spend,” Aggarwal says. 

Revenue grew roughly 300% last year, pushing the company towards $10 million in ARR as the team expanded from 25 to nearly 100 people. BiteSpeed competes with Interakt, Wappbiz, Zoko, Chat Mitra, and QuickReply.ai in the conversational commerce space. 

What's next

BiteSpeed has raised three funding rounds totalling $5.6 million since its founding. The company secured $275,000 in its first seed round in December 2020, led by Whiteboard Capital, with participation from First Cheque, Upsparks, and First Principles.

In February 2022, it raised $1.9 million in a second seed round led by Peak XV's Surge (formerly Sequoia Capital India's Surge), with participation from First Cheque, Whiteboard Capital, and angel investors including CRED Founder Kunal Shah and Teachable Founder Ankur Nagpal.

The most recent raise was a $3.5 million pre-Series A round in January 2024, again led by Peak XV's Surge, with participation from Whiteboard Capital and angels such as Unacademy CEO Gaurav Munjal, Bella Vita CEO Aakash Anand, and Meta's APAC Head Dhruv Vohra.

Over the next year, the startup plans to expand its voice AI capabilities in customer support while deepening tools that improve on-site conversion. Having started operations in the UK and Australia in 2024, the company is now focused on strengthening its presence in these markets.

“Our main goal is to become a complete revenue operating system for ecommerce brands,” Aggarwal says. Long term, BiteSpeed envisions AI agents that autonomously handle marketing, support, social media, and every customer-facing touchpoint.