Sendbird raises $16M in Series A led by Shasta and August

To our customers, users, blog readers, and followers — we have some exciting news for Sendbird and for you, the companies and developers who have installed our SDK into over 7200 applications across 153 countries.

We just raised $16M in Series A funding led by Shasta Ventures and August Capital, adding to the $2.6M in seed funding from Y Combinator, FundersClub, Justin Kan, Kevin Mahaffey, Sandy Kory, and Nicolas Dessaigne.

First, we want to say, “Thank you,” to all our customers and users, our investors and supporters. Thank you for trusting us to be the platform for your business’s conversations, now and in the future.

Second, we’d like to welcome Doug Pepper, Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, and Villi Iltchev, Partner at August Capital, to our Board of Directors. Both Doug and Villi impressed us with their commitment to nurturing our growth and their warmly offered wisdom and industry insight. We’re excited and grateful to work with both of them.

Our mission is to digitize human interactions for businesses.

Our product is the central pillar of that mission–to build and maintain the chat and messaging platform that gives you and your users the confidence to reach out and engage with one another. To build a product that you love.

We understand that building and maintaining a richly featured chat requires serious commitment and resources. That’s why Sendbird will continue to focus on a genuinely valuable and innovative product, built around the features that our customers need at the scale they need.

To that point, we’ll invest our Series A in what probably should be the tripod of our business success: (1) product development (2) customer experience and (3) an excellent team. Without one of these legs, we would fall. But investing in each of these together, we will stand sturdily, a support to each other.

Product development

From Sendbird’s inception, the key focus has always been our product. Adding real-time conversation to enable person-to-person interactions on our own apps — our product hatched from this, our own seemingly simple problem. Now we’re offering a full set of premium features and the ability to scale over a million concurrent users.

Being product-people at heart, our series A will help us double-down on the product development that will increase our value for our customers. A long-term partnership with Sendbird means more than adding a chat feature to an enterprise or consumer app. It is continued access to cutting-edge conversational technology as it is adopted globally.

We’re “making something people want.” Since addressing our own product need in 2016, our product matured by delivering on promises made to our customers to meet their diverse requirements. “Endless tenacity for customers,” our first company value, continues us down that path.

Customer experience

We owe our growth to our customers. And, in this first phase, we have tried most of all to meet customer needs in our product.

But now we need to do an even better job working and communicating with our customers. We’ll invest our time and effort to create the best experiences for those on Sendbird’s customer journey — when they discover our product, learn about its value, build amazing conversational experiences, and adapt our solutions for their own success.

We are going to discover and orchestrate better ways for customers to interact with our team throughout their journey.

Building a great team

The goals above can only be achieved by working with talented and dedicated people who are aligned with our mission and values.

We’ve been fortunate to find this in our current team. But if you’re as excited about the news as we are, then you should know that we’re hiring and would love to welcome more people to our team!

Please check out our careers page.

We are looking for product people like us, for customer-obsessed people like us, for people who want to make a difference to our customers, and build a life-time achievement together.

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I think of a bird who endlessly flies toward the horizon, one that seems only to endlessly recede, to move further away. To embark from land over the ocean must be daunting. But it’s only the first phase, the first departure. Endlessly pursuing that horizon would be exhausting. But like that bird, we are facing the horizon, experiencing new phases and growing each time. We’re excited for this new opportunity for growth and to experience it together and not as lone birds.

Here’s to the future.