Founded in 2004 by Baroda Sheth, Gupshup is a messaging services company based in India, with operations in the United States and the United Kingdom. Gupshup enables ease of doing conversation through conversational messaging technology. It has helped various businesses in different areas, from test marketing to sales and support companies in emerging markets.
The company’s professional-level platform offers a 30-channel messaging API that provides a rich interactive experience and tools for creating collaborations between messaging channels.
More than a Billion-Dollar Valuation
Following the recent $100 million fundraising from Tiger Global Management, Gupshup is the latest entrée to the unicorn club as its valuation increased tenfold to $1.4 billion. The company is now aiming to leverage this investment to accelerate the interaction between businesses and consumers through message and product exchange channels. This technology is already being integrated into the business plan globally.
Gupshup’s Pandemic Induced Growth – A Rare Feat
The pandemic is accelerating how companies can communicate digitally with their customers and create messaging and networking experiences. Besides, as consumer prices rise, bilateral conversations are becoming necessary to be pursued by businesses.
With its latest funding rounds, the company will invest in product innovation and in-house research and development. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, offline retail stores (including restaurants, grocery stores and hairdressers) are also in high demand of moving to digital platforms. The company is now committed to creating digitally connected experiences for consumers.
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Through Gupshup, companies have made communication an integral part of successful customer interactions. Like websites, chat experiences allow companies to improve communication and sales with their customers.
Gupshup’s Model and Services
Gupshup offers APIs for more than 30 communication channels, especially SMS, to attract users. This includes chatbots, launch tools, advanced inbox functions, brainstorming, and client management software. The Gupshup API enables 100,000+ developers and businesses to create communication and messaging experiences and deliver 6 billion messages per month across 30+ messaging channels.
Modernizing the Conversational Messaging Market – What Can Others Learn?
As conversational platforms use artificial intelligence technology that allows people to interact with computers in a way that mimics human conversation, the sector has a lot of growth potential. Company’s working in this sector of technology in India have a significant mobile economy as their market. It has vast potential in equally dynamic voids in emerging markets similar to India.
With a focus on automation, self-service, development centres, APIs and user-friendly solutions for partners, learning from the Gupshup model, new entrepreneurs can enable clients of all sizes to use IP messaging more easily and quickly and create interactive experiences for their customers.
Furthermore, the size of the global conversational AI market is projected to grow from $ 4.8 billion in 2020 to $ 13.9 billion in 2025, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.9% over the forecast period.
The future frenzy of customers through social media platforms and the increasing integration of advanced AI functions are the main factors that add value to the conversational message market. This is expected to provide growth opportunities for new entrepreneurs and companies operating in different market segments of the sector.
Conversations are increasingly becoming the front end of businesses’ new digital activities – almost all companies are dependent on it. Hence, new start-ups of this segment can have a unique place to enter the chat platform market.
