Yalo, a conversational commerce company that enables enterprises to connect directly with consumers through messaging apps like WhatsApp, will invest on expanding its presence in India, a top executive said.
The San Francisco-headquartered company has raised $50 million from B Capital Group, a venture capital firm cofounded by Eduardo Saverin, one of the cofounders of Facebook.
Part of that money will be used “to further expand the market in India in the enterprise space, and also for product development”, said Javier Mata, chief executive officer of Yalo.
The firm focuses on ‘messaging first’ economies such as India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America to grow its business.
“A third of our user base is in India and it’s in the high double-digit millions,” Mata said. “It has the potential to grow to be our largest market in terms of users.”
India is currently the second largest market for Yalo after Latin America. It plans to deepen its presence in the consumer goods, retail, and financial services segments in India.
“We will continue to expand upon the applications that we already have for conversational commerce like conversational payments, marketing and help desk,” Mata said. “We will also continue to open Yalo Studio to partners. This is a low code platform that allows non-developers to create these conversational applications.”
Yalo is growing its product development teams in different parts of the world including India. It currently has 30 developers in the country and plans to triple this number in the next few months.
The company customises its solution depending on the local market conditions. In India, for instance, it has integrated UPI payments and allows users to chat in multiple languages.
“The adoption of digital payments (in India) has been a much faster pace compared to Latin America or South East Asia – there’s a lot more payments enabled through chat compared to other parts of the world,” Mata said.
He expects conversational commerce to rapidly become mainstream going forward.
“Conversational commerce is rapidly becoming ecommerce 2.0 by enabling brands to connect critical business systems with consumers on messaging apps, where they already spend 84% of their phone time, particularly in our core markets of Latin America, India and Southeast Asia,” Mata said. “Yalo helps companies handle the customer relationship and the purchasing process end-to-end. We are confident that conversational commerce global sales volume will outgrow ecommerce in the long run.”
