This article was co-authored by B Capital Group Co-Founder Eduardo Saverin, General Partner Rashmi Gopinath and PrincipalRobert Kaplan.

Conversational commerce has continued to grow exponentially over the last few years and even more remarkably in the last 18 months fueled by COVID tailwinds. As the pandemic pushed more retailers and consumer goods customers toward ecommerce adoption, online sellers and brands face increasing pressure to deliver hyper-personalized, multi-channel conversational commerce experiences. Messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger are well-positioned to provide a seamless user experience for conversational commerce by meeting customers where they are and on their terms.

Ninety percent of the world’s smartphone population uses messaging platforms, with WhatsApp users alone delivering over 100B messages a day. Yalo’s strong execution in emerging markets such as Latin America and Asia has established it as a global leading conversational commerce platform, enabling large enterprise businesses like Unilever, Nestle, AB Inbev, Coca-Cola, and Walmart to communicate and transact directly with consumers. In Latin America alone, Yalo is supporting companies with a combined customer base of 350 million and sales volume of $81 billion.

This is why we’re thrilled to announce that we are doubling down on our investment in Yalo from our previous investment in Yalo’s Series B in August 2020. Over the last 12 months, Yalo has continued on its strong product innovation journey, expanding the core conversational commerce platform by adding high demand platform features such as a self-service conversational app builder and AI-powered re-engagement tools. These new product capabilities empower enterprise customers to customize business workflows to fit their unique needs in a democratized, no-code way.

 

The impact of Yalo’s platform is evidenced by direct customer outcomes. For instance, one enterprise retailer highlighted realization of unprecedented e-commerce conversion rates of >20% when customers interacted with Yalo workflows versus <1% on traditional ecommerce channels. During the pandemic, Yalo enabled companies like Coca-Cola to shift offline commerce to conversational commerce, generating an increase in sales of more than 20%. Similarly, Sears leveraged Yalo to increase its own conversion rate via c-commerce by 260%. Customer proof points like these, coupled with the scalable nature of the Yalo platform and recent product additions like the Yalo payment gateway, affirm our conviction that Yalo will continue to maintain its industry leadership.

Yalo has continued to drive incredible ROI to its customers across expanded, broad use cases. Unlike simple chatbots or SMS marketing tools, Yalo’s workflow builder allows companies to utilize messaging platforms as a full stack channel for commerce. Yalo enables everything from B2B purchases to loan applications to outbound sales and marketing enabling consumer and B2B focused businesses to increasingly digitize their customer interactions.

This has led to 180%+ net revenue retention numbers as Yalo customers continue to find new use cases to drive significant value through messaging platforms. Speaking to Yalo’s customers is truly an eye into the future — they are using the product to transform their interactions with their customers and use the platform to create more human-like digital interactions. We only see these expansions continuing to increase as Yalo rolls out next-gen digital commerce enabling product updates.

While Yalo remains fully focused on serving a massive opportunity in the Latin American market, we are excited to see Yalo’s customers utilize the platform on a global scale in over 41 countries. Yalo has already seen strong customer adoption and demand in South East Asia and Europe, and we believe they are also well-positioned to explore expansion opportunities in the US market.

Beyond our excitement for Yalo’s product and the massive market opportunity, we are incredibly impressed with CEO Javier Mata’s vision. His ability to execute and track record of attracting and enabling top talent are some of the core reasons why Yalo continues to grow rapidly. Recent executive additions to the team include seasoned CFO Patrick Zanoni and VP of Engineering Carlos Whitt. Yalo continues to build local go-to-market teams in new markets across South East Asia and Europe.

We are big believers in Yalo’s mission to humanize interaction between enterprises and their customers and are excited to deepen our partnership with Yalo to enable enterprises worldwide to leverage conversational commerce to transform their businesses and adapt to the future of commerce.