Malaysian Messaging Platform Respond.io Secures $62.5 Million, Sets Sights On Acquisitions

Respond.io — the Kuala Lumpur-based company that helps businesses manage conversations across messaging apps — closed a $62.5 million Series B round led by Camber Partners, with participation from Endeavor Catalyst and returning backers, the company said. The new capital will fund hiring, international expansion and targeted purchases of complementary technology and teams as the startup ramps up its push into North America and Western Europe.

Founded in 2017 and relocated to Malaysia two years later, Respond.io offers a platform that centralizes customer chats from services such as WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, Line, Telegram and WeChat, as well as voice and web chat. Its system deploys automated conversational bots to triage high volumes of inquiries, qualify potential buyers and, in some cases, complete transactions without an agent stepping in — a capability the company says is critical for businesses that rely on one-on-one discussions before a sale.

Co-founder and CEO Gerardo Salandra, who previously held roles at IBM and Google and worked on a fitness app later sold to a larger buyer, started the business in Hong Kong with CTO Hassan Ahmed and COO Iaroslav Kudritskiy. Respond.io last raised a $7 million round in 2022 and has since scaled usage to about 2 billion messages every quarter, the company reported.

Respond.io’s commercial approach departs from seat-based enterprise pricing: customers are billed according to conversation volume rather than the number of human users. The company argues that model aligns with rising automation because revenue doesn’t fall when bots handle more interactions. Industry observers say the firm’s early focus on messaging has given it a trove of interaction data that improves its automated systems over time. “Companies that collect conversational data at scale gain an advantage in training smarter automation,” said Priya Nair, a technology analyst at MarketSignals. “That’s a competitive edge newcomers must overcome.”

Geographically, Respond.io already pulls revenue from a wide mix of markets: roughly three-tenths from Asia-Pacific, three-tenths from Latin America, one-fifth from the Middle East and Africa, and the remaining one-fifth split between North America and Western Europe. Salandra told investors the latter two regions are now the fastest-growing, and he expects them to become the company’s largest markets within a couple of years as organizations shift more customer service onto messaging channels.

Despite the cash infusion and growth ambitions, leadership says it will avoid reckless expansion. The company plans a blend of organic hiring and acquisition — both for plug-in technologies and for established teams with customer bases in priority regions — and is already in discussions with prospective targets. And while the CEO described a public listing as the preferred long-term outcome, he emphasized measured, sustainable scaling over chasing topline growth at any price.