Sendbird co-founders. (From left) Lee Hang-no, Kim Yeo-shin, Kim Dong-shin, Jeon Yun-ho
Sendbird, a global company in mobile engagement and communications, has attracted a $100 million Series C investment.
This investment round was led by Steadfast Capital Ventures (STEADFAST) and exceeded the target. In the future, Karan Mehandru, managing director of Steadfast’s venture capital division, will join Sendbird’s board of directors. New investors include Emergence Capital, Softbank Vision Fund 2, and World Innovation Lab. Existing investors include ICONIQ Growth and Tiger Global Management. Global Management) and Meritech Capital participated.
In this funding, Sendbird became the first unicorn company to be a global B2B enterprise software startup founded in Korea, as it was recognized for its corporate value of 1.05 billion dollars. With this, including Sendbird, there are a total of 12 domestic unicorn companies.
The number of apps and monthly users (MAU) using the Sendbird platform has tripled since the announcement of Series B funding in 2019. Currently, leading mobile companies including Reddit, Hinge, Paytm, Teladoc, Virgin Mobile UAE and Delivery Hero use Sendbird’s chat and video platform. Over 150 million users each month communicate through the Sendbird platform.
Sendbird connects users and users, and users and brands through rich in-app conversations that encompass text, voice, and video. As billions of consumers around the world do more with mobile apps at home and at work, Sendbird, the world’s number one white-label mobile conversation platform, has grown with it. In particular, as this trend spreads across industries due to the Corona 19 pandemic, the demand for Sendbird solutions that can build chat, voice, and video chat functions in apps with only a few lines of coding has also increased significantly.
Dongshin Kim, CEO of Sendbird, said, “All companies in various fields from food delivery to healthcare, education, entertainment, and shopping are seeking digital communication with customers.” Meanwhile, “Users now expect to communicate with other users and brands within the mobile app. It is Sendbird’s role to meet this,” he said. “From simple conversations such as ordering delivery or making inquiries to online sellers, seeking advice from other users in an online community that shares hobbies, and telemedicating to a doctor through video calls. “Up to receiving the message, Sendbird is helping users around the world communicate with brands and achieve what they want.”
Karan Mehandru, Director of SendBird, said, “In all industries, brands are increasingly seeking to increase user engagement and retention by implementing real-time communication with customers through in-app chat. Sendbird’s market leadership and product scalability are the driving force behind communication between today’s brands and hundreds of millions of users around the world, and Sendbird will continue to benefit most from the market growth.” In addition, he said, “We are pleased to lead this investment round. We expect Sendbird to continue to lead the field of in-app chat, voice and video conversation, which will become the most important customer communication channels in the future.”
Ben Selebisik, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Hinge, the largest dating app in the United States, said, “For the fast adoption of a new digital method for establishing meaningful connections between users, Sendbird’s video calling and chat API was the best solution.” “As Hinge is a mobile service that connects millions of users to each other, we needed a reliable partner to handle the size of our customers.”
With this investment, Sendbird plans to spur aggressive R&D to reinforce the business value created by existing products as well as new product development. To this end, it is also planning to increase its manpower. Sendbird currently has offices in Seoul, New York, London, Munich, Singapore and Bengaluru, in addition to its Silicon Valley headquarters.
“Our customers are experiencing a very dynamic and highly competitive business environment,” said Dongshin Kim, CEO of Sendbird. “Our goal is to help customers improve their business metrics by launching new mobile experiences within a short period of time.” In addition, “Sendbird Calls, launched last year, are in high demand as an API that provides audio and video experiences to mobile apps. From the explosive popularity of the clubhouse, it can be seen that services using audio and video are just beginning to take place. We look forward to creating the future of mobile experiences with our customers in the future.”