Gurgaon-based Bitespeed, a SaaS company that provides e-commerce brands with chat-based commerce services, announced today that it has raised $1.9 million (roughly Rs 14.3 crore) in a Seed round led by Sequoia India Surge.
A Seed financing round was also attended by First Cheque, Whiteboard Capital, and angel investors, including CRED founder Kunal Shah and Teachable founder Ankur Nagpal. Prior to this round, the Gurgaon-based firm had raised $275,000 from Whiteboard Capital in December 2020.
BiteSpeed, founded in June 2019 by Vinayak Aggarwal, enables customer retargeting and retention via WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which have ten times higher open and conversion rates than other online alternatives.
The company allows e-commerce businesses to sell and communicate with their customers through chat and messaging apps. “This enables brands to generate an estimated 10 percent of revenue through chat as a channel, lower customer acquisition costs, and increase lifetime value,” the company stated.
According to Bitespeed, the funds raised will be used for hiring, technology development, marketing, and expansion in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
“The past decade of e-commerce brands were built on acquiring customers through Facebook or Google Ads and retaining them through email marketing. However, with chat apps like WhatsApp and Instagram taking center stage in recent times, our bet is that the future of commerce is conversational. At BiteSpeed, we’re building the conversational commerce stack for e-commerce brands to engage and sell to their customers on chat,” said Vinayak Aggarwal.
He went on to say that the startup now has over 1,500 brands as customers in 50 countries. Surge’s sixth cohort of 20 companies includes BiteSpeed, which develops fresher, smarter solutions to help consumers and businesses adapt to a changing world.
It uses a freemium business model to sell to small and medium ecommerce businesses all over the world, relying on self-service product-led growth.
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