Sendbird, a San Francisco based company, Y Combinator W16 batch graduate and one of our portfolio startups allowing developers to integrate chat, audio and video features with their applications using its APIs has raised $100M in Series C with the company valuation of $1.05B.
The funding round was led by Steadfast Financial in participation with Softbank Vision Fund, Tiger Global Management, ICONIQ Capital, World Innovation Lab, Meritech Capital Ventures and Emergence.
Here is the quick summary of Sendbird financials:
- 2016 – Seed round
- 2017 – Series A – $16M
- 2019 – Series B – $102M
- 2021 – Series C – $100M
With the latest Series C funding, Sendbird’s total funding amount has summed up to $220.7M according to Crunchbase.
Since the rise of COVID pandemic from last year, online messaging and communication has become a basic need for everyone including businesses. Most of the businesses are integrating messaging features with their apps and websites to stay in touch with their users and colleagues. This has also boosted the demand for Sendbird’s chat APIs. Now, they have more than 150 Million MAUs (Monthly Active Users) who send 2.5 Billion+ messages per month.
Sendbird offers complete chat platform to its customers in the form of three products:
- Sendbird Chat, for chat messaging.
- Sendbird Calls, for voice and video.
- Sendbird Desk, for embedded customer support.
Sendbird is trusted by large number of its valuable customers including Reddit, Paytm, Headspace and Hinge etc. You may also check their pricing and start your free trial today.
Sendbird is indeed one of a wave of companies that have identified both that trend and the opportunity of building that functionality out as a commodity of sorts that can be embedded anywhere a developer chooses to place it by way of an API. It’s not the only one: Others in the same space include publicly listed Twilio, the similarly named competitor MessageBird (which is also highly capitalised and has positioned itself as a consolidator in the space), PubNub, Sinch, Stream, Firebase and many more.
That competition is one reason Sendbird has raised money. It gives it more capital to bring on more users, and critically to invest in building out more functionality alongside its core features, to address the needs of its existing users and to discover new opportunities to provide them with features they perhaps didn’t know they needed in their messaging channels to keep users’ attention.
“It’s an arms race going on between messaging and payment apps,” Sid Suri, Sendbird’s marketing head, said to me in describing the competitive landscape. “There is a high degree of urgency among all businesses to say we don’t have to lose users to any of them. White label services like ours are powering the ability to keep up.”
“We are doing a lot around transactions and payments, as well as logistics,” John Kim, Sendbird’s CEO and founder said in an interview. “We are really building out the end to end experience [since that] really ties into engagement. A couple of new features will be heavily around transactions, and others will be around more engagement.”
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