Enterprise Conversational AI leader Yellow Messenger raises Series A Funding of $4 Mn from Lightspeed, Angels

Bringing startup-style disruption to enterprises through AI

June 2019: Yellow Messenger, a leading provider of conversational AI solutions to enterprises, announced today that it has raised Series A funding of $4 million (Rs. 27 crores) from Lightspeed Venture Partners and prominent angel investors. Yellow Messenger plans to use the funds to further its cutting-edge deep tech capabilities, and also to expand its customer success teams and presence in high-potential markets across Asia, the Middle East, and other emerging markets.

The angel investors that participated in the round include Phanindra Sama (Founder, Redbus and CIO of Telangana State), Kashyap Deorah (Founder of Hypertrack, Author of Golden Tap), Anand Swaminathan (Senior Partner, McKinsey & Co.), Prashant Malik (Co-founder, Limeroad), Nishant Rao (former MD, Linkedin India), Kunal Bahl (co-founder Snapdeal) , Rohit Bansal (co-founder, Snapdeal), Monisha Varadan (Zephyr Ventures), and Alap Bharadwaj (APAC Innovation, Google).

Yellow Messenger CEO Raghu Ravinutala says “We are excited about partnering with Lightspeed and our eminent angel investors to invest deeply in R&D and expand our global presence to build the most impactful enterprise technology company for the AI era. We’re excited about how enterprises are boosting efficiencies by a significant order of magnitude using our cognitive automation platform – we call them 10xEnterprises!”

Large Enterprises are traditionally known for incremental process improvements, leaving disruptive changes to startups. Yellow Messenger aims to change that paradigm radically. Their AI platform allows Enterprises to leverage disruptive capabilities to supercharge efficiencies & growth across enterprise functions by significant orders of magnitude. Yellow Messenger is on a mission to create intelligent, efficient, responsive enterprises of the future – powered by their cutting edge platform capabilities, deep vertical & process knowledge formulated into pre-built ready-to-use bot templates that are thoroughly customizable for each customer with minimal code, and deep consultative hands-on enterprise engagements.

Dev Khare, Partner at Lightspeed Ventures says on their decision to invest in the startup: “We believe that Asia’s businesses require fundamentally different solutions for enterprise software, driven by unique organizational structures and consumer expectations, Yellow Messenger is tapping into the messaging-centric expectation that Asia’s 4.5 billion consumers have for interacting with large consumer companies in verticals such as banking, financial services, utilities, travel, and e-commerce.”

The Yellow Messenger Story

A three-year-old deep tech startup based in Bangalore and incubated at renowned startup accelerators Microsoft Accelerator and SAP Startup Studio,  Yellow Messenger serves close to 100 large enterprise customers and has experienced a revenue growth of ARR (Annual recurring revenue) of more than 5 times in just the past one year. Raghu attributes Yellow Messenger’s success to its talented founding team which has deep technology, product and enterprise experience at leading global tech companies.  The CPO (Chief Product Officer), Rashid Khan, is a globally respected published author in the field of AI and Machine Learning.

Yellow Messenger is leading the wave of conversational AI in enterprises across the world. Yellow Messenger’s strength lies in its unique NLP technology that seamlessly understands over 130 languages including English, Hindi, Bahasa, Cantonese, Thai, Mandarin, and Arabic.

The proprietary technology is industry agnostic and it is currently serving 10+ industry verticals including retail, travel & hospitality, banking, insurance, pharma & healthcare, energy, and consumer goods. Some of the biggest brands across these diverse industries have adopted the Yellow Messenger technology. Its clients include the likes of Unilever, AIG, Bajaj Finance, HDFC Bank, Asian Paints, Dr. Reddy labs, and Concentrix.

The platform has handled over a billion conversations and has reported some fantastic outcomes for clients including driving incremental revenue growth in tens of millions of dollars, reduction in support costs by 300%, and increased NPS (Net Promoter Score) by 45%. Yellow messenger has also built prominent partnerships with several technology majors including Microsoft, SAP, Cisco, and Accenture.

About Yellow Messenger

Yellow Messenger is a leading conversational AI platform that helps enterprises significantly boost efficiency and growth by offering always-on, intelligent conversational automation on text and voice across multiple channels like WhatsApp, Google assistant, Alexa, Web, and mobile apps. It has industry-best NLP technology that creates a seamless user experience. Yellow Messenger currently serves more than 10 industries including retail, travel & hospitality, banking, pharma & healthcare, energy, and consumer goods. The platform has processed over 1 billion conversations and has reported some fantastic outcomes for clients including increased engagement by 300%, reduced support costs by 30%, increased leads up to 500%, and increased NPS(Net Promoter Score) by 45%.

About the founders

Raghu Ravinutala, CEO

After graduating with a degree in Electronics and Communications from NIT Warangal, Raghu became the Senior IC Design Engineer at Texas Instruments before becoming the Director of Applications Engineering at Magma Design Automation. This was followed by a product strategy role at TeleradTech as Vice President of Product Management & Business Development. Before launching Yellow Messenger, Raghu served as Senior Manager for Broadcom India for four years.

Rashid Khan, CPO

Rashid is a graduate of Computer Science and Engineering from NIT Warangal. He is also a published author of two books in the AI and IoT fields — “Build Better Chatbots” and “Learning IoT using Particle Photon & Electron”. Prior to Yellow Messenger, Rashid served as a Product Engineer for the IoT team at EdgeVerve. He’s also worked as a Web Developer for the Non-Profit Organization, Lakshya.

Jaya Kishore Reddy Gollareddy, CTO

Before Yellow Messenger, Jaya Kishore served as a Software Engineer for a number of companies including fashion startup Myntra, CA Technologies, and SemanticBits. Before launching Yellow Messenger, Kishore was co-Founder and Lead Engineer at Storemate, a full-fledged e-commerce marketplace platform for designer products. Kishore is a graduate of Information Technology from IIIT Hyderabad and has deep expertise in areas like rapid prototyping, mobile applications, and design thinking.

About the investors

Lightspeed India Partners

Lightspeed India Partners (LSIP) is a venture capital firm investing in early stage companies and founders in the consumer internet, B2B software and other industries. LSIP has been investing in India for more than a decade and was an early stage investor in companies such as OYO hotels, ed-tech venture Byju’s, B2B online marketplace Udaan, vernacular social media platform Sharechat amongst others.

LSIP is currently investing from its second fund of $175 Million, currently has two offices in Delhi & Bangalore and an investment team of 6 partners.