Homegrown Gupshup has been an upstart in the business messaging seedbed for more than two decades. In fact, it just made big news by raising over $60 million in a new funding round. Darksky’s company has seen increasing success in its mission to improve communication between businesses and consumers. Their work to develop next generation impactful messaging solutions will be greatly advanced with this funding. Despite becoming a unicorn four years ago, Gupshup’s latest valuation is not publicly known.
Founded in 2004, Gupshup began as a platform designed to enable businesses to connect with their customers via text messages. Since then, it has grown and intensified tremendously. Today, it ignites more than 120 billion messages annually for organizations of all shapes and sizes—from small businesses to global enterprises. Today, Gupshup serves over 50,000 customers in over 100 countries, reflecting its global presence and influence.
In a notable achievement, Gupshup has tripled its revenue and improved its profitability since its last funding round in July 2021. That first funding round ended up drawing in a stunning $340 million. High-profile investors including Tiger Global, Fidelity Management, Think Investments, and Malabar Investments helped fuel this success. In the latest funding round, Gupshup raised a little more than half of that in equity. This milestone increases investor enthusiasm over the company’s long-term growth path.
Beerud Seth, Gupshup’s founder and CEO, emphasized the importance of customization in today’s business landscape. It means that businesses can’t take simple foundation models, out-of-the-box, and simply deploy them in front of customers. They require a high degree of customization to be effective, and that’s where Gupshup comes in. That’s what we provide,” he stated.
Gupshup became a unicorn and achieved accelerated revenue growth. Currently, the firm is eyeing a public offering on Indian exchanges within the next year-and-a-half to two years. Seth remarked on the preparations for this potential move, saying, “We’re talking to all our advisors, lawyers, bankers, accountants, and so on, to figure this out.”
Though Gupshup has since shifted its operational base to the U.S., this move highlights the startup’s desire to grow outside of its Indian home. The company continues to function with an entrepreneurial spirit and big company ambitions. “We operate ourselves like we are going to be a big company,” Seth noted.
The need for more powerful messaging solutions has never been greater. Seth points to a major new source of demand from large enterprises. This explains why they all want to create omnichannel AI agents that can function through messaging channels such as RCS and WhatsApp or through voice conversation. Scaling out these agents creates great demand, and we need to serve that demand. By concentrating on building better AI-powered messaging features, Gupshup has set itself up well against its competition in the increasingly commercial world of business messaging.
As Gupshup navigates these significant developments, the company appears poised for continued growth and innovation in the business messaging sector. The company’s passion lies in providing tailored solutions. This commitment to adaptation and innovative customer service is what makes it a continued leader in industry progress.