Respond.io Secures $62.5M Series B to Expand AI Messaging Platform Through Strategic Acquisitions

When Respond.io launched in 2017, its goal was to solve a growing business challenge: keeping up with customers who had shifted from email and phone calls to messaging apps. Today, the Kuala Lumpur-headquartered startup has emerged as one of Malaysia’s leading technology success stories.

The company announced that it has secured a $62.5 million Series B funding round led by Camber Partners, with participation from Endeavour Catalyst and existing investors. The raise follows its $7 million Series A round completed in 2022. Respond.io says it has reached $35 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), representing 169% year-over-year growth while maintaining a 30% profit margin.

Respond.io was founded in Hong Kong in 2017 by CEO Gerardo Salandra, CTO Hassan Ahmed, and COO Iaroslav Kudritskiy. Salandra previously worked at IBM, Google, and fitness app Runtastic before co-founding the company. The startup relocated its headquarters to Malaysia in 2019.

Its customer conversation platform enables mid-sized and large business-to-consumer companies to manage customer interactions across messaging services,s including WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, LINE, Telegram, WeChat, voice calls, and web chat. The platform also deploys AI agents to automatically answer customer inquiries, qualify leads, and even complete sales with minimal human involvement.

Salandra said the platform primarily serves businesses where customers typically require conversations before making purchasing decisions, including healthcare, automotive, retail, education, and travel. Respond.io focuses on organisations with between 200 and 10,000 employees.

As AI adoption accelerates, questions have emerged over whether general-purpose AI tools such as ChatGPT could replace specialised customer engagement platforms. Salandra believes Respond.io’s market position remains strong, noting that the company now processes roughly two billion customer messages every quarter.

“If I just look at the numbers, every day that AI becomes more prominent, we grow faster,” Salandra said. “We are not seeing what the public SaaS markets are seeing.”

He attributes part of that advantage to the company’s pricing model. Unlike many enterprise software providers that charge per user seat, Respond.io prices its platform based on customer conversation volume, regardless of whether employees or AI agents handle interactions.

Salandra also argued that many traditional customer service platforms were originally designed around email and phone support before messaging became mainstream, making messaging capabilities secondary rather than central to their products.

The company believes its growing message volume also creates a competitive advantage. More customer conversations generate additional data, improving AI performance, which attracts more customers and further strengthens the platform’s AI capabilities. Salandra described this as a “data flywheel” that gives Respond.io an edge over newer competitors entering the messaging AI market.

The newly raised capital will support hiring, product expansion, organic growth, and acquisitions. Salandra said Respond.io is seeking both complementary technologies that strengthen its existing platform and established businesses with customer bases in strategic markets such as North America and Europe. He confirmed the company is already in discussions with several potential acquisition targets.

Currently, approximately 30% of Respond.io’s revenue comes from the Asia-Pacific region, another 30% from Latin America, and about 20% from the Middle East and Africa. North America and Western Europe account for the remaining 20%. However, Salandra expects those markets to become the company’s largest revenue contributors within the next two to three years as businesses rapidly adopt messaging-based customer engagement.

Despite the fresh funding, Salandra said the company remains committed to disciplined growth rather than pursuing expansion at any cost. Looking ahead, he said his long-term ambition is to take Respond.io public by listing it on Nasdaq.