Yalo
Enabling growth through conversational commerce.
Startup Snapshot:
Startup name: Yalo
Industry: Conversational AI
Business Model: Software as a Service (SaaS)
Founder: Javier Mata
Headquarters: San Francisco, United States
Operations: Mexico, India, Brazil, and the US
Founded: 2015
Stage: Series C
Investors: NXTP, Sierra Ventures, B Capital, Glisco Partners, FEMSA Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst, Bossanova Investimentos
Website: https://es.yalo.ai/
Yalo’s Purpose:
The adoption of AI for automation is becoming increasingly popular across industries and geographies. By automating business processes, companies aim to enhance productivity, reduce costs, and elevate customer experience. In this context, the use of AI automation for sales, marketing, and the entire customer journey is gaining significant interest to transform how businesses interact with clients. In Latin America and Emerging Markets, the widespread adoption of messaging apps like WhatsApp presents a great opportunity for firms to automate processes and reach out to customers where they already are. Yalo, an AI-driven conversational commerce platform, is capitalizing on this potential by acting as a digital bridge between companies and clients through multiple interfaces, including WhatsApp.
Despite the digitalization efforts made by many enterprises, their initiatives often face challenges in customer adoption. Consumers are reluctant to adopt multiple specialized apps, which limits the effectiveness of these initiatives. However, Yalo overcomes this challenge by leveraging WhatsApp, which has over 2.2 billion unique mobile users worldwide. By tapping into this existing platform, Yalo has a key success factor that can be used to recreate the offline relationship between companies and their clients using AI. This enables them to engage more effectively with their customers, achieve better business results, and enhance customer experiences.
BCG estimates that c-commerce is already a $35 billion market and will grow to $130 billion by 2025 in emerging markets alone, accounting for 60% of all digital commerce.
Yalo provides a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution in conversational AI that offers critical workflow automation with marketing and commerce applications for businesses across various verticals. Its platform can intelligently engage and manage any workflow a customer might need. Recently, Yalo introduced generative AI capabilities to its foundation intelligence offering, including an AI-powered sales assistant that creates personalized shopping carts based on customer preferences and past purchases. Additionally, Yalo introduced a more general advisor that can be trained on any customer data or manuals, which helps to train employees, provide insights into data trends, and give customers personalized advice. By streamlining shopping through personalized and simple conversations in any interface, Yalo enhances customer relationships, increases sales, and helps enterprise companies scale their businesses while delivering a seamless shopping experience.
What sets Yalo apart:
Yalo sets itself apart from other customer engagement solutions by providing a unified platform powered by AI. This platform seamlessly guides customers throughout their journey, personalizing their experience at every touchpoint. Using data from all interactions, Yalo ensures that each customer receives a tailored journey that resonates with them, promoting deeper engagement and satisfaction.
The Yalo team comprises experienced professionals specializing in the technology sector. Founder and CEO Javier Mata has a background in providing tech solutions to emerging market industries. Chief Revenue Officer Phil Sebok brings over two decades of experience in high-growth SaaS sales environments. John Stockton, who has held leadership roles in prominent tech companies like Magento Commerce and Adobe, heads the product teams. Santhana Parthasarathy leads the Engineering team and draws from his experience at top-tier companies like Salesforce and Dropbox. This collective proficiency drives Yalo's remarkable growth and establishes it as a leader in the AI-driven customer engagement space.
What’s next for Yalo:
According to BCG, c-commerce is already a $35 billion market and is expected to grow to $130 billion by 2025 in emerging markets alone, accounting for 60% of all digital commerce. Interestingly, some of Yalo's customers have reported that up to 80% of their sales are now happening through messaging apps. This is a significant shift, particularly for brands in the consumer-packaged goods sector, traditionally relying on physical retail channels such as supermarkets, corner shops, or vending machines.
Although Yalo was not actively seeking additional funding, they saw an opportunity to accelerate their growth and decided to go for it. Their main focus is always on providing value to their customers, and in this case, they wanted to speed up their product development. This way, customers would have access to conversational marketing and payments and a no-code builder to create various types of conversational apps more quickly.
According to Javier Mata, co-founder, and CEO, Yalo was not actively looking for funding, but it recognized an opportunity to improve its product development and enhance customer value and seized the opportunity.
Yalo remains committed to providing value to its customers, and with the additional funding, the company intends to create a no-code builder that will enable customers to create a variety of conversational apps more quickly and efficiently. This will allow Yalo's customers to benefit from faster product development and have access to more streamlined conversational marketing and payment solutions.
Key Takeaways:
Yalo provides a SaaS solution in conversational AI, focusing on enhancing customer engagement.
The company uses AI to personalize and contextualize experiences, recreating offline relationships between companies and clients.
The market has shifted from web to mobile and now from mobile to conversational apps, and Yalo has become the leader in conversational commerce.
Instead of building new channels and tools to communicate with the customer, Yalo operates via WhatsApp or SMS, where the customer already is, reducing friction and increasing usage and satisfaction.
VC Headlines:
Fundraising: How To Recognize And Manage ‘The Pit Of Despair’ - Forbes
Large Language Models’ Emergent Abilities Are a Mirage - Wired
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