Series B Funding: The Story Continues

Hello everyone!

We have pretty exciting news to share with you. As you may have heard, we recently raised a $52 million Series B, which was a huge milestone. Now, we have topped it. Because international interest in our platform is so strong, we decided to extend the round to help our customers around the world with more care and responsiveness. We’ve added another $50 million to our arsenal bringing our total Series B raise to $102M. Tiger Global Management, one of the top international investment firms, led the extension, with significant participation from our initial Series B lead, ICONIQ Capital.

We are deeply grateful to have such incredible, knowledgeable investment partners who are fully aligned with our goals and growth trajectory, investors who believe so deeply in what we are doing that they stood up to say let’s make it happen even faster! We’ve been the no.1 chat API and we want to double down on our position with better product and better customer experience. We still have to figure out a lot of things, build great team, maintain and continue to invest in our culture of serving customers with endless tenacity, but this really is an exciting time for all of us, to be able to really strive for our dreams and goals.

Our Plans

Today, 76% of the world’s population uses messaging apps every month. This is a testament to the incredible power of chat and messaging technologies as facilitators of communication. Despite this, highly scalable, broad-reaching messaging experiences haven’t yet taken off abroad. There are a couple of reasons why, chief among them is that private messaging and operation of group and public chat rooms is very hard to do, particularly when it comes to doing them super reliably at massive scale. And the more time we spend with our customers’ product and engineering teams, the more we realize, how much of an effort (and sometimes, distraction) is for them to rebuild, iterate, and maintain the chat features and infrastructure. It’s just not worth their time and resources. We’re here to help.

Secondly, the messaging market has been consolidated among only a handful of leading consumer messenger apps and now a lot of businesses have to rely on their platform to reach their customers and to enable real-time conversation between users. We believe that Sendbird can change this. Sendbird is here to empower businesses with everything businesses need to facilitate their most important business goals – whether it’s driving more bookings for on-demand apps, creating better-informed customers who transact more quickly in marketplaces, or increasing engagement and retention in online communities.

We’re still early in our company’s journey, but we’re making a lot of progress with our customers to really level up the game. Sendbird has the chance to transform the types of experiences and interactions companies give their users and customers, making them much more personal, relevant, and engaging. To this end, we are using a significant portion of the Series B to hit the ground running. We’re opening offices in Singapore, London, and Bengaluru. This is in addition to our existing APAC office in Seoul. We’re also going to ramp up marketing and sales in key regions that we believe will help us better serve customers abroad. We want to be the global leader in chat API, but at the same time, be the local provider for you.

But It’s Not All About Going Global

We realize that $102 million is not a small Series B, and it brings our total funding to date to $121 million since we graduated from Y Combinator just a few years ago. This backing enables us to continue investing deeply in product development. Our ability to innovate is our greatest asset, and now we can devote even more resources to delivering solutions that delight and inspire both companies and users.

The funding also helps us hire the incredible talent required to take the company to the next level — to be able to build the best product possible in the world. We will be making significant additions to our team. Check out our jobs openings and come back often as we’ll be posting positions across product, engineering, sales, design, people & culture, marketing, and other areas of foundations.

And, our goal remains the same: to build the no.1 chat API in the world. Sendbird will become even faster, more scalable and reliable in every region, develop more SDK and API features to build on, make it easier than ever to use, and support our customers responsively and effectively. Expect better documentation, better developer tools, and more engagement with our community. We are fired up and ready to go. Hope you can feel the energy! There are lots of big developments in the works, and we want you to be with us every step of the way.

A Word About Where Sendbird Stands Today

In closing, I’d like to share that increased funding is not the only milestone we’ve marked recently. Over the last year, we’ve tripled the number of messages sent through the Sendbird platform. We surpass 1 billion messages per month, and we’ve grown beyond 50 million monthly active users. It is this growth and market demand that has attracted the world’s leading investors.

Our team is stronger than ever, grew from just 30 people to over 100 today within a year. We’re aiming to double our team before end of the year, so please do check us out! 🙂

This is a great time for our company, and we have no intention of slowing down. Thank you for believing in Sendbird!