NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Ingrid Lunden

Facebook has long been working on raising WhatsApp’s profile as a channel for businesses to interact with (and sell to) their customers. Today, a startup that has built a suite of tools for retailers and others to build and run those services over WhatsApp and other messaging platforms is announcing growth funding to address that opportunity.

Yalo, which describes itself as a c-commerce (“chat commerce”) startup building tools for businesses to use messaging apps as part of their customer outreach and sales strategies, has raised $50 million, funding that it will be using to expand its services with a specific focus on emerging markets like Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Yalo already counts big brands like Unilever, Nestle, Coca-Cola and Walmart among the customers using its platform for sales and marketing efforts. In total that speaks to potentially an audience of 350 million, although Yaho doesn’t disclose how many people are actually using Yalo services as a part of that.

Photo courtesy of Danial Igdery.