SA’s Clickatell Raises $91 Million in Series C Funding for US Expansion

South African firm Clickatell has announced that it has secured $91 million in their series C round.

This round was led by Arrowroot Capital, with participation from Kennedy Lewis Investment Management, Endeavor Global and Harvest.

The CPaaS innovator and Chat Commerce leader has continuously delivered double-digit profitable growth for several years. It will use the series C capital to scale and expand three key areas: (i) Accelerated development and innovation of its Chat Commerce offering, (ii) Expansion of its footprint in the U.S., and (iii) Scaling of sales and marketing efforts on the back of growing demand from leading brands.

The funds will also allow the company to significantly grow its engineering skills. It has already earmarked over 200 positions with a strong focus on boosting its African skills complement in the coming months.

“In 2019, Clickatell was the first to launch chat banking, bringing banking services functionality to chat channels. Our successes would not be possible without the trust and collaboration of our customers, some of Africa’s largest and most successful companies in the world,” said Pieter de Villiers, Co-Founder and CEO at Clickatell.

“We look forward to working with businesses and financial institutions across the continent to enable Chat Commerce, the future of digital commerce and engagement. Soon, every consumer in Africa will engage family and friends via chat plus connect, interact and transact with the brands they love through their favourite chat platform,” he added.

Clickatell’s platform has been recognized as a global leader in powering mobile messaging/ CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) and payments within chat. Clickatell processed more than 30 billion interactions, and 2 billion commerce transactions during the COVID-19 period alone as it enabled customer-centric brands to connect, interact and transact with their customers wherever they were sheltering in place during the pandemic.

With a massive $80+ billion Total Addressable Market (TAM), the Chat Commerce market is viewed as the third big wave of digital commerce, following the eCommerce and App Commerce markets. Chat is the largest digital platform in the world, with 7.7 billion users compared to 4.7 billion internet users, making it next to impossible for businesses to operate without communicating and transacting with consumers in chat channels.

Chat Commerce enables businesses to easily facilitate significantly improved customer experiences through chat, with the added benefit of being far more efficient for customers and operational costs. Clickatell is uniquely positioned to capitalise on the intersection between communications (CPaaS, CCaaS) and commerce (digital payments) – offering a complete end-to-end Chat Commerce Platform.

Clickatell serves more than 10,000 customers, many of which are Fortune 500 companies and leading global brands such as Coca Cola, Deloitte, GT Bank, Booking.com, GoDaddy, IKEA, Novartis, Standard Bank, Tangerine, Telegram, US Foods, Visa, Zipcar, Capitec and others. Clickatell’s low / no-code, feature-rich Chat Commerce orchestration capability includes assisted (chat desk) and unassisted (bots) chat and secure payments capability in its recently launched Chat 2 Pay offering.