Conversational AI platform Yellow Messenger raises Series B from returning investor Lightspeed

Two days after closing global funds worth over $4 billion, Lightspeed Venture Partners has already started to double down on potentially high-growth portfolio companies in India. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform Yellow Messenger has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round from the Menlo Park, California headquartered venture capital firm.

The investment has been made by Lightspeed India Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, said a statement, without specifying which of the firm’s global funds participated in the round. 

Lightspeed India Partners invests here from a $175 million country-specific fund. 

Bitonic Technology Labs, the Bengaluru based company that owns and operates the Yellow Messenger platform, had previously raised its Series A round of $4 million in June 2019 from Lightspeed and a clutch of angel investors including Snapdeal co founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, and redBus co-founder Phanindra Sama, among others.

The platform acts as a single source of intelligence for customers and employees across multiple communication channels including Microsoft Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, telephony, and can be integrated with the existing System of Record and System of Engagement at the enterprise level. This helps enterprises automate workflows for customer and employee engagement utilizing chatbots.

The platform claims to be able to carry out these engagements on voice and text in over 120 languages. The platform in partnership with Facebook Messenger was also appointed by National Health Authority of India to provide chatbots for citizen engagement for Covid-19 response at the state government level.

“In less than three years, Yellow Messenger has quickly established itself as a leader in conversational AI for the enterprise. We anticipate demand for the company’s platform to accelerate as consumer expectations of real-time conversations with their brands deepen,” Amy Wu, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners said in the statement.

Yellow Messenger was founded in 2014 by Rashid Khan, Jaya Kishore Reddy and Raghu Ravinutala. “We’ve seen huge demand for our conversational AI platform since the very beginning, achieving 5X growth in bookings, year over year, since 2017,” said CEO Raghu Ravinutala. “This investment will help us scale our operations and speed track the R&D endeavors to service the surge in global demand for automation,” he added. 

Enterprise focused conversation AI companies have seen an uptick in investor interest. Cloud-based digital workflow technology provider Service Now acquired Passage AI in February. Reliance-owned AI platform Haptik recently launched its conversation and digital solutions vertical Conversation.ai. In September 2019, Haptik had acquired conversational AI platform Buzzo.ai.