Customer and sales engagement tool WATI (WhatsApp Team Inbox) has raised $23M in a series B funding led by Tiger Global on Wednesday. The funding round witnessed participation from existing investors such as Sequoia Capital India & Southeast Asia, along with new investors DST Global Partners and Shopify. 

The company, in a press release, stated that this marks e-commerce firm Shopify’s first venture-based investment in a startup operating in the Southeast Asia region.  The series B came after an $8.3M series A round 10 months ago. Since 2020, WATI has raised over $35M. The company plans to use the raised funds for product enhancement, to scale the teams, and expand the customer base in India and other key markets.

WATI’s cofounder Bianca Ho said, “It’s been an exciting 2022 at WATI culminating with this new funding round. We doubled down on our product with more automations, making it a seamless digital tool and must-have for any business. We went vertical in our approach and created integrations and partnerships with Zoho, Shopify, Google Sheets among others to help scale growth and sharpen the product. The team has grown, revenue and customer numbers have doubled and now we look to scale the business, operations, teams around the world.”

Established in 2020, Bianca Ho and Ken Yeung founded WATI to help SMB (Server Message Block) with a self-service and low-code product on the WhatsApp Business API. It enables companies to have scalable, personalized conversations to help businesses meet their customers on messaging platforms which are personalized, accessible, and engaging in real-time.