Photo: ManyChat
ManyChat, a San Francisco, California-based messenger marketing platform company, recently announced it raised $18 million in funding. This round of funding was led by Bessemer Venture Partners. And Flint Capital also participated in the round.
The funding will be used for hiring across various operational roles including R&D, marketing, and customer success. And in conjunction with this funding round, Bessemer partner Ethan Kurzweil is joining the company board as an observer.
What does ManyChat do? It helps small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) grow by utilizing popular messaging apps like Facebook’s Messenger for engaging with customers.
“Over 2 billion people are now using messaging apps and for most of them, it has become the default way to connect with each other. This is a massive shift in consumer behavior, yet business-to-customer communication seems stuck in the past,” said ManyChat co-founder and CEO Mikael Yang. “Our mission is to be a champion to small businesses and to help them grow by building meaningful relationships with their customers. We believe that messaging apps is the most effective way to do that today.”
As there are now more than 2 billion people now using messaging apps, ManyChat has positioned itself as being at the forefront of helping businesses to connect with those customers in a personalized way. Businesses using ManyChat have been experiencing an 80% open rate on average compared to the average email open rate of about 20%.
Over the past year, ManyChat tripled its customer acquisition between 2017 and 2018. And ManyChat also announced it now reaches more than 1 million registered accounts and it is seeing 7 billion messages being exchanged every month. Plus ManyChat’s customers now collectively also now have more than 350 million subscribers.
“ManyChat is at the forefront of a major shift in how businesses market to customers. It’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ email lists and static forms get replaced with a more personalized and conversational approach to customer engagement,” added Kurzweil. “ManyChat’s traction on Facebook Messenger is only the beginning. With Instagram, WhatsApp, RCS, and others on the horizon, there’s endless potential to scale.”
