R ARIVANANTHAM
CHENNAI, NOV 17
Gallabox a conversational commerce platform which helps Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) increase their sales through WhatsApp, on Thursday, announced it has raised $ 1.2 million in seed funding. The funding was led by Prime Venture Partners with participation from 100x Entrepreneur Fund.
Announcing our latest investment in @gallabox as it helps SMBs accelerate #Sales on @WhatsApp! Excited to work with @Karthikj @yogeshnarayanan & @YathinVP as they revolutionize conversational commerce for Indian #SMBs #buildforbharath
Read here – https://t.co/CJVuz2c6Dg pic.twitter.com/nIkXf3JnR9
— PrimeVenturePartners (@Primevp_in) November 17, 2022
The no-code conversational commerce platform leverages WhatsApp Business API to help SMBs improve their sales conversions and offer a full mobile experience to their customers without the need for a mobile app. Several noted angel investors also participated in the round including Pallav Nadhani (ex-CEO, FusionCharts), Abhishek Rungta (Indus Net Technologies), SV Swaroop Reddy (ex-SPI Cinemas), and Siva Rajamani (co-Founder & CEO, Everstage).
- Investors: Prime Venture Partners, 100x Entrepreneur Fund and other strategic angels
- Gallabox has a roster of more than 500 paying customers, including PVR, ShipRocket, Pickyourtrail, Credit Mantri, Goireland etc. across D2C, Education, Health & Wellness, Financial and Travel services in India and across 20 other countries.
- India is home to 75 million SMBs with 20 million of them digitally influenced, according to a report by Zinnov
Founded by Karthik Jagannathan, Yogesh Narayanan & Yathin Panchanathan, Gallabox empowers SMBs to manage their sales conversions on WhatsApp, putting an end to poor conversions and broken customer experience using legacy tools. Since its inception in 2021, Gallabox has a roster of more than 500 paying customers, including PVR, ShipRocket, Pickyourtrail, Credit Mantri, Goireland etc. across D2C, Education, Health & Wellness, Financial and Travel services in India and across 20 other countries.
India is home to 75 million SMBs with 20 million of them digitally influenced, according to a report by Zinnov. Acquiring customers digitally, SMBs spend enormous efforts and marketing budgets to generate leads, but struggle to convert them because of opacity of customer conversations, multiple touch-points, and dependence on sales team-members to provide updates. There is no way to keep track of prospective conversations, streamline them to the right team-members, get transparency to customer interactions, enable greater team collaboration, and finally take the prospect to closure. Most SMBs cannot afford to develop interactive experiences like a mobile app unlike large companies.
Gallabox enables businesses to interact with their customers instantly on WhatsApp, understand their requirements and offer a collaborative experience. Gallabox is the always-on ‘digital agent’ for businesses to deal with new customer expectations and sell better. The multi-agent team inbox and campaign features are layered with a sophisticated but simple-to-use, no-code bot, thereby marrying the ease of messaging with the power of automation.
With more than two billion users on WhatsApp and more than 500 million in India alone, coupled with SMS becoming increasingly spam-prone, businesses are fast discovering WhatsApp to be the best way to connect with their customers. While enterprises have the resources to build interactive tools to communicate and transact with their customers on WhatsApp, small & medium-sized businesses do not have the budget or skill-sets to build these sophisticated tools. Gallabox makes it easy for such businesses to be up and running in a matter of minutes and leverage a pre-built library of templates to deliver a world class experience to clients, turning customer conversations into sales.
Currently investing out of its USD 1.2 million Fund IV, Prime Venture Partners is typically the first institutional investor in startups in Fintech, SaaS and Digital India, and focuses on companies with an innovative approach to solving fundamental problems through technology. Prime’s mission is to partner early with entrepreneurs and help build world-class technology companies that are addressing some of India’s most important problems. Prime’s prominent Limited Partners include International Finance Corporation (IFC), part of the World Bank Group, a top-tier University endowment, global family offices and institutions, and numerous global technology entrepreneurs.
Commenting on this, Karthik Jagannathan, CEO & Co-founder, Gallabox, said, “We are thrilled to partner with Prime Venture Partners and 100x Entrepreneur Fund as they share our optimism for automating customer conversation workflows for SMBs at scale. Indian SMBs are maturing and there is an immediate need for digitisation & automation to help them with rapid sales growth and transformation. We are excited about the Bharat-SMB opportunity and want to empower a million SMBs with enterprise-level sophisticated tech and tools to acquire and retain customers.”
Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners, said, “Karthik, Yathin and Yogesh are passionate about hyperlocal and SMBs like no other team we’ve met. Their deep insights made backing them a simple decision for us at Prime. It’s no secret that, around the world, such businesses have to be transformed in the next 2-3 years through digitization and automation. Gallabox’s WhatsApp automation with a quick start ready-to-use tool will help business owners focus on their core business while modernizing and automating customer conversations to compete with big players on an equal footing.”
Siddhartha Ahluwalia, 100x Entrepreneur Fund, commented that “The Gallabox team’s understanding of the needs of SMBs is unparalleled in the industry. They have leveraged three important trends. Firstly, WhatsApp is the business communication application of India. Secondly, SMBs for the first time want to leverage customer data to drive better relationships with their customers and to increase sales. Thirdly, SMS has become a redundant medium for businesses to reach out to customers. The Gallabox investment matches our fund thesis of backing exceptional seed stage SaaS startups run by founders who have unique insights and experiences in the markets they operate in.”
