Hong Kong-based WATI announced that it had raised $23 million in a Series B round of funding led by Tiger Global. Existing investors Sequoia Capital India participated in this round, along with new investors DST Global Partners. This also marks Shopify’s first venture investment in a start-up in Southeast Asia, the company claimed.

The company claimed it would use the additional funding to scale its team and invest in the product stack for low-code automation, encouraging wider adoption of digital tools. This includes launching aggressive go-to-market plans in emerging markets such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, including India.

WATI had raised $8.3 million during a Series A announced earlier this year. The latest capital infusion brings it total funding to $35 million since its launch in 2020.

WATI’s co-founder Bianca Ho said, “It’s been an exciting 2022 at WATI, culminating with this new funding round. We doubled down on our product with more automations, making it a seamless digital tool and must-have for any business. We went vertical in our approach and created integrations and partnerships with Zoho, Shopify, Google Sheets among others to help scale growth and sharpen the product. The team has grown, revenue and customer numbers have doubled and now we look to scale the business, operations, teams around the world.”

Bianca Ho and Ken Yeung founded WATI to help organisations have personalised conversations with customers at scale with an easy-to-use customer engagement software, which is built on WhatsApp Business API. This includes sending personalised notifications from their system in a programmatic way through WATI’s API. It has also integrated its conversational solutions with platforms like Zoho, Shopify and Google Sheets.

Targeting small and medium enterprises, it allows these companies to support their customers through a seamless team inbox with smart routing, canned responses, data tagging, and analytics. Many of these interactions can be automated through low-code workflow builders and chatbots so that companies can have more engaging conversations with their customers smartly. 

Headquartered in Hong Kong, WATI claimed that its global business reaches over 60 countries, serving over 1600 customers.