SendBird, a San Mateo, California-based chat and messaging API service for mobile and web applications, announced it has raised $52 million in Series B funding led by ICONIQ Capital. Existing investors Shasta Ventures, August Capital, Y Combinator, and Funders Club also participated in this recent round.
With the new funding round, SendBird is going to rapidly scale its services to fully address the $4.2 billion market for user-to-user messaging services. Currently the world’s most scalable chat platform, SendBird is capable of supporting more than a million concurrent connections in each application and 500 million messages a day per application. And it is used by some of the biggest mobile and web apps in the world.
It is estimated that 76% of the world population uses messenger apps. And of the 5.8 billion people who use a messenger application every month, millennials and Gen Z have shown that messaging is their preferred way of communicating with people and businesses due to the convenience and immediacy.
Founded by John S. Kim, Harry Kim, Forest Lee, and Brandon Jeon, SendBird provides businesses with what they need for adding user-to-user messaging to their apps and helps maintain the best messaging experience to keep users engaged. Plus SendBird extends its platform to create customizable and large scale user experiences through an SDK and API.
“As our customers are experiencing, chat and messaging provide the most efficient way to connect with others today,” said SendBird’s CEO John S. Kim in a statement. “We are committed to helping enterprises and organizations around the world harness that power to improve engagement, retention, and conversion. To this end, we will use our latest round of funding to attract and retain talented people so we can continue creating the best possible product and scale our go-to-market.”
SendBird is working with nearly 50,000 developers and 12,000 applications. And more than one billion messages are sent through the platform every month. Some of SendBird’s biggest customers include NBA, Yahoo! Sports, Glu Mobile, Accolade, Dream11, and Zepeto.
“We believe in the powerful trends of messaging and chat as the modern way customers want to communicate,” added ICONIQ Capital general partner and new SendBird board member Matthew Jacobson. “SendBird’s market leadership as the most complete messaging platform allows developers and businesses to truly transform the way customers connect within their applications.”
