Smooch, a cloud messaging platform which helps companies facilitate rich customer conversations over multiple messaging and communication platforms, has secured CA$10 million (approx US$7.67 million) in an institutional seed round. The financing was led by by Real Ventures and iNovia Capital, with participation from TA Associates and Smooch’s founders.
“Smooch is the first messaging company to offer B2Cs a fast, cost effective infrastructure to offer and scale messaging. This emerging market presents a huge opportunity to make an impact on how consumers interact with their favorite brands,” said Chris Arsenault, Managing Partner at iNovia Capital.
According to the company, this financing round will be used to expand its support for consumer messaging channels and business software vendors, and to continue to build its team. The company also revealed that it is currently hiring for more than 20 positions in San Francisco and Montreal, including senior sales, product marketing, and engineering positions.
Hamnett Hill, CEO and Co-Founder of Smooch, said:
Beyond making it easy for businesses to have rich conversations with their customers, Smooch provides a 360-degree view of all conversations with their customers, creating a more human relationship. This financing will support our ongoing investments in our team and partnerships, so we can help even more companies reach more customers on more messaging platforms, with more compelling experiences.
Smooch Conversation CloudSM, Smooch’s unified messaging platform lets companies use their existing business software and processes to have rich conversations with their customers through messaging apps and SMS, to websites and mobile apps. It also integrates with popular consumer messaging channels such as Facebook Messenger, LINE, WeChat, Kik, Telegram, Twilio and others.
According to the company, many software makers, such as FrontApp, Slack and ZenDesk, are integrating with its messaging platform to enable thousands of companies, such as Frank + Oak, Harry’s and U-Haul, to create compelling messaging experiences for their customers.
Chris Messina, Developer Experience Lead, Uber, said:
Conversational commerce is happening to every consumer-facing industry. Businesses that meet their customers where they are — i.e. in contextually relevant conversational channels — will win. Smooch gets this better than anyone else.