Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Customer conversation management platform respond.io has secured $62.5m in Series B funding, which will support its expansion into North America and Europe as it seeks to grow its presence in markets where businesses are increasingly using messaging platforms and social commerce channels to engage customers and drive sales.
The funding round was led by Camber Partners, with participation from Endeavor Catalyst and existing investors.
Founded in 2017, respond.io provides a platform that consolidates customer interactions across multiple channels, including WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, LINE, Telegram, WeChat, voice calls, email, web chat, and other integrations. The platform combines messaging, automation, customer relationship management (CRM) integrations, and AI-powered capabilities to help businesses manage customer conversations from a single interface.
Respond.io primarily serves business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations in sectors such as education, healthcare, automotive, retail, and travel. According to the company, its platform processes around 2 billion messages per quarter for more than 10,000 businesses across over 180 countries. Its customers include Toyota, British Airways, Radisson, Hertz, and Decathlon.
Respond.io said it selected Camber Partners as its lead investor due to the firm’s experience supporting software companies through operational and international growth initiatives. The New York-based growth equity firm has previously invested in companies including Dropbox, PandaDoc, and Pipedrive.
“When we started talking to Camber Partners, that conversation felt different,” said Gerardo Salandra, CEO and Co-Founder of respond.io. “We built respond.io over nine years across markets most competitors never entered and did it profitably. Camber Partners and other investors backed us because they understand what that means: real product-market fit, with great unit economics, and a business that raises to accelerate, not to survive.”
Scott Irwin, Founder and Partner at Camber Partners, said the firm sees significant growth potential in the company.
“Respond.io spent nine years building the infrastructure for high consideration, AI-native customer conversations – and they did it profitably in diverse markets. They have an exceptional team that has leveraged AI to accelerate rapidly. We believe respond.io is positioned to lead this category at a global scale,” Irwin said.
The company began as an omnichannel inbox designed to help businesses manage customer interactions across multiple messaging applications. Over time, it expanded its platform to include automation, routing capabilities, and more recently, AI-powered agents.
Respond.io said advances in large language models (LLMs) enabled it to build AI agents on top of its existing infrastructure, which includes integrations with messaging channels, voice services, email systems, CRM platforms, and compliance tools. The company argues that its experience handling large volumes of customer interactions provides operational data that helps improve its AI capabilities over time.
Today, respond.io’s AI agents are used to engage with prospective customers, qualify leads, and support B2C sales processes, with human operators taking over when needed.
The company has also participated in early product rollouts from Meta and TikTok, including integrations for the WhatsApp Business Calling API, TikTok Business Messaging, and TikTok Messaging Ads.
“Most businesses still treat customer conversations as a cost to manage. The ones winning right now treat them as the revenue channel they actually are, and they’re automating everything that doesn’t require a human so the humans can focus where they add the most value,” Salandra said.
Respond.io said it has established a strong presence across Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, markets where mobile messaging plays a significant role in commerce. The company plans to use the latest funding round to increase its reach in North America and Western Europe.
“The customer conversation management space is at an inflection point,” Salandra said. “North America and Western Europe are moving toward leveraging conversations as a competitive advantage to generate revenue, using similar workflows we’ve already built and tested in markets where this shift happened first. We know how to serve these businesses, and with this funding, we now have the resources to reach them faster.”
Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn and Chairman of Endeavor Catalyst, also commented on the investment. “We are thrilled to be investing in respond.io in this new round. Respond.io is exactly the kind of company we are proud to support — founders building profitable infrastructure in emerging markets and scaling them into the world’s largest economies.”
