Kuala Lumpur-based Respond.io has raised a $62.5M Series B led by Camber Partners, with Endeavor Catalyst and existing investors joining, as the conversational messaging platform pushes into North America and Europe through acquisitions. The round is nearly nine times the size of the company's $7M Series A in 2022, and lands as Respond.io hits $35M in annual recurring revenue, growing 169% year-over-year at a 30% profit margin.
Respond.io routes customer conversations for mid- and large-sized B2C businesses across WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, Line, Telegram, WeChat, voice and web chat, then layers AI agents on top to qualify leads, answer questions and close sales without human handoff. The platform is now processing 2 billion messages per quarter. Its sweet spot is companies with 200 to 10,000 employees in what CEO Gerardo Salandra calls high-consideration verticals: healthcare, automotive, retail, education and travel.
"You don't go to a website, put your credit card, and buy a car; you chat with someone, you ask a lot of questions," Salandra said. That is the wedge Respond.io has been working since 2017, when Salandra co-founded the company in Hong Kong with CTO Hassan Ahmed and COO Jaroslav Kudritskiy before relocating the team to Malaysia in 2019. Salandra previously worked at IBM and Google and at Runtastic, the fitness tracking app Adidas bought in 2015.
Key facts
- 01Respond.io raised a $62.5M Series B led by Camber Partners with Endeavor Catalyst, nearly 9x its $7M Series A from 2022.
- 02The company hit $35M in ARR, growing 169% year-over-year at a 30% profit margin.
- 03Respond.io is processing 2 billion customer messages per quarter across WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and other channels.
- 04Revenue mix: 30% APAC, 30% Latin America, 20% Middle East and Africa, 20% North America and Western Europe.
- 05CEO Gerardo Salandra says he is already in talks with acquisition targets in North America and Europe.
Salandra's pitch against incumbent customer-experience platforms is that they were built for a different era. Email and the phone call were the assumed defaults, and messaging was retrofitted on top — useful, but never the architectural center of the product.
The pricing model is the second piece. Most enterprise software competitors charge per seat, which means the vendor's revenue falls when a customer swaps human agents for AI. Respond.io charges by conversation volume instead, so an AI agent answering a customer is worth the same as a human doing it. "When fewer humans use your product, they make less money. But we don't charge like that," Salandra said.
That alignment is one reason the company has not seen the demand softness now showing up in public SaaS results. The other is what Salandra calls a data flywheel: more messages running through the platform produce better AI, which attracts more customers, which produces more messages. A nine-year head start on conversational data, he argues, is hard for a ChatGPT-era entrant to replicate from a standing start.
The new capital is earmarked for hiring, organic growth and M&A. Salandra has two acquisition shapes in mind: bolt-on technology that plugs into the existing stack, and established teams with paying customer bases in strategic Western markets. He confirmed Respond.io is already in talks with a couple of potential targets, though he did not name them.
The geographic logic is straightforward. Respond.io currently generates roughly 30% of revenue from APAC, 30% from Latin America and 20% from the Middle East and Africa, leaving North America and Western Europe combined at just 20%. Those Western regions are now the company's fastest-growing segments, and Salandra expects them to become the largest within two to three years as businesses there migrate from email and call centers to messaging.
There are reasons to keep expectations measured. Respond.io is competing against deep-pocketed CX incumbents now bolting AI onto their own stacks, and Salesforce's $3.6B acquisition of Fin earlier this year signals how aggressively the category leaders are buying conversational AI capability rather than build it. Discipline on burn will matter: "We don't want to be a growth at all costs company. Even with this money, we're going to be very disciplined," Salandra said. His stated ambition is a Nasdaq listing.
What makes Respond.io interesting beyond the round size is the pricing geometry. Conversation-based billing means the company's revenue scales with deflection, not headcount, which is the opposite of every seat-priced SaaS business currently watching AI eat its expansion motion. If that model holds at scale, Respond.io is one of the few customer-experience vendors whose unit economics improve as enterprises automate more aggressively — and that is a more durable position than any single AI feature.
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