
By Beerud Sheth, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer | Gupshup
I’m excited to share that Gupshup raised a $100m funding round, led by Tiger Global Management. Click here to read the press release.
I want to take this opportunity to share below a few personal thoughts about what this means for our vision, mission, customers, partners and employees. In other words, a little gupshup about Gupshup. (“gupshup” means chitchat in hindi).
This funding will greatly accelerate our R&D efforts. Gupshup has a long history of innovation, of always pushing the limits of messaging. While some of the attempts may not have been commercially successful, we certainly uncovered something new every time. Some of our innovations and related activities over the past few years include an sms-based social network (twitter like sms-gupshup), reply-all group-sms, teamchat messaging app, thought-leadership on bots, earliest bot platform, multiple bot builder tools, interbot platform, launch partner with Facebook Messenger and Google Assistant, earliest global partner of WhatsApp, launch partner with Amazon .bot TLD, partnerships with handset OEMs, Gupshup IP (GIP) messaging channel, on-device AI software for message classification and visualization, conversational messaging on feature phone and more. These products include the earliest instance of combining intelligent automation with messaging APIs – what we now call conversational messaging. Some of these products were way ahead of their time, some required ecosystem changes that never happened, but a few have been breakout successes that are propelling our growth today. This spirit of innovation guides us as we continue to bring market leading solutions to our customers.
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