Gupshup CEO on $100M funding: ’It accelerates our vision of conversational messaging’

Beerud Sheth, Gupshup Founder and CEO, joins Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous to discuss the messaging platform startup’s growth and outlook on messaging services.

Video transcript

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ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: The conversational messaging startup Gupshup is the 10th startup to join the unicorn club this year alone after it raised $100 million in funding from the Tiger Global Management group, propelling its valuation by tenfold to $1.4 billion. Joining me now is the company's CEO Beerud Sheth. Beerud, good to see you here. For folks who are not familiar with Gupshup, we say it's a conversational messaging app, but tell us exactly how you help businesses communicate and engage with their customers.

BEERUD SHETH: Sure. Firstly, the word gupshup itself means chitchat, right, which is appropriate for a messaging and chat app. What we are is a messaging platform, first and foremost. Businesses need to communicate with customers in real time. So for example, when you're shopping at your favorite e-commerce site, you get a message which says your order is confirmed, your package is arriving, or your airline says your flight is booked or delayed, and so on, right.

These are text messages that businesses send to consumers in real time. And we are a platform that enables that across geographies, across operators, and so on. And what's exciting is today what is just simple one-way basic notifications is changing because of new messaging technology into a two-way conversation, such that users can even reply to it, which means when you get that flight notification, you can upgrade your flight with one click or if you get-- you know, you can reschedule your package delivery, and so on, right. So when you have two-way conversations between businesses and consumers, you can do customer support, sales and commerce, marketing, and so on, and that's what we call conversational messaging.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Well certainly, the pandemic, I would imagine, has just accelerated the need for businesses to be able to effectively communicate with their customers. And I'm curious if what you've seen is companies that wouldn't necessarily be thinking about that or needing to beef that up, if those companies, sort of the offline retailers, are now turning to platforms such as your own in a bigger way because of the world we're living in?

BEERUD SHETH: Absolutely, right. There's a huge shift from offline to online, from physical to digital, because consumers want to be safe. They want to work at a distance or, in many cases, they're not even walking into the malls or restaurants and so on, right. So all of these businesses are-- to-- to survive and thrive in this new environment, they're moving quickly to adopt these new technologies, so, you know, if you can order food from a restaurant, if you can order from a retail store, look at deals, offers, and so on.

And by the way, a lot of these things are very commonplace in China, where WeChat, a messaging app, is a super app that enables many of these use cases. It's just that it's now trickling into other parts of the world, and we are enabling that, building the tools that help businesses to engage customers wherever they are in their favorite messaging app.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Yeah, let's talk about some of those emerging markets where you're seeing increased demand, Africa, Southeast Asia, including India. How have you expanded or helped to expand in those parts of the world?

BEERUD SHETH: You know, that's a great question. These parts of the world are what are called mobile-first ecosystems, right. I think in America, the web, email, and other voice calls and so on are very popular, right, call centers and so on. But when you go to emerging markets, it's really just almost exclusively mobile messaging.

So the entire life, you know, you get your pay stubs, and you get, you know, transactions and bank notifications, everything through-- through messaging, so it's a really big deal. And the kind of requirements that we see and the customers we interact with, they want to do more and more things just through messaging. India is a very early mover in adopting these sort of conversational experiences.

Latin America is great, Africa, Southeast Asia, and so on. So we're seeing tremendous growth in adoption, including, like, not just the large enterprises, but very small businesses, restaurants, right, the corner grocery store and so on adapting tools like WhatsApp or SMS with interactive conversations to enable a lot of these things. So we are seeing a lot of growth in those areas.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: So Beerud, it's my understanding that the company is actually profitable, which is refreshing for a newly minted unicorn. This raise of $100 million is the first in about a decade. Tell us how you plan to-- to put that money to work.

BEERUD SHETH: Yeah, it's been a long and hard journey, but we've been growing our business prudently and sustainably so-- and experiencing-- experiencing a lot of growth now. We-- with this new funding, it really accelerates our vision of conversational messaging. We think, literally, every business is going to need to build these conversational experiences, just like, you know, maybe 25 years ago when the web was new, everyone needed to build a website. Now they are going to have to build these-- these chat experiences.

And we are building the tools for it. So we are going to invest in-- firstly, in research and development, a lot of product innovation, enabling these new use cases also in different geographies specialized by industry and so on. The second area, of course, is sort of the go-to-market effort, sales, marketing in different countries around the world. And lastly, you know, and opportunistically, we are going to see if there's some acquisitions, perhaps some product companies that might complement our portfolio.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, we look forward to following your story there at Gupshup, the chat messaging platform. CEO Beerud Sheth, thanks so much for being with us.