Photo: SendBird
SendBird, a San Mateo, California-based customizable chat and messaging API service for mobile and web applications, announced it has raised $50 million in funding. Including this round of funding, SendGrid’s Series B is now $102 million total. SendGrid decided to extend the round in order to meet the growing demand for in-app user-to-user messaging. This extension was led by Tiger Global Management and it also included significant participation from the initial Series B lead ICONIQ Capital.
Quickly established as the world’s leading in-app messaging platform and API, SendBird has tripled the number of messages that were sent through its platform – which is now surpassing 1 billion messages per month and the company has grown beyond 50 million monthly active users. Plus SendBird also increased its full-time employees from 70 to 98 since January 2019 after the company grew 180% in 2018. SendBird also recently opened offices in Singapore, London, and Bengaluru.
“Our primary goal for the next 2 years is to really build our market presence as the leader of the industry. Starting from marketing and sales, we are building the go-to-market engine to scale our global presence by hiring leaders in key areas of the business and building teams around those leaders,” said SendBird CEO and co-founder John S. Kim. “The second important reason is to build and master global operations. We’ve already hired in UK, Singapore, and India. And we continue to hire rapidly in our two main locations, US and Korea. Since our customers are global, we aim to build global operations as our core competency. The portfolios of our new investors have built a strong muscle for building global software companies, so we’re excited to learn from their experience through this partnership.”
As of right now, 76% of the world population uses messenger apps. However, widespread global adoption of user-to-user messaging in business applications has been hindered by key factors. For example, the messaging market has been consolidated among just a few messenger apps. And in-app user-to-user messaging is difficult for engineering teams to maintain.
Using SendBird’s product and expertise, businesses are able to incorporate this globally adopted messaging channels into their apps easily without having to hire a dedicated engineering team for the project. SendGrid provides everything that businesses need to add user-to-user messaging to their app while it continuously innovates the messaging experience so businesses can drive key goals forward. SendBird provides the software infrastructure that allows any app to offer services such as VoIP calls, messaging, group chats, and photo-sharing. Some of SendBird’s biggest customers include NBA, Yahoo! Sports, GO-JEK, Carousell, Virgin Mobile UAE, SEGA, Glu Mobile, Healthline, TriNet, and Accolade.
“SendBird has emerged as the category leader, recognizing the immense demand from businesses for a chat and messaging solution and meeting these needs with a customer-focused product and API. As a result, the momentum has been strong,” added ICONIQ Capital general partner Matthew Jacobson. “By championing software engineering teams, extending their ability to build, scale and maintain complex chat and messaging infrastructures, SendBird continues to serve and delight customers. The company’s enthusiastic reaction in Europe and Asia demonstrates a large global opportunity we will continue to invest against.”
