Respond.io, the Kuala Lumpur-based customer conversation management platform, has announced a $62.5 million Series B funding round led by Camber Partners, with participation from Endeavor Catalyst and existing investors. The company — profitable at a 30% margin with $35M ARR and 169% year-over-year growth — will use the capital to fuel expansion and acquisitions across North America and Europe, two regions it expects to become its largest segments within the next two to three years.
From Messaging Inbox to AI Revenue Engine
Founded in 2017 by Gerardo Salandra (CEO), Hassan Ahmed (CTO), and Iaroslav Kudritskiy (COO), Respond.io was born out of a simple observation: customers had migrated to messaging apps, but businesses lacked the infrastructure to respond efficiently from fragmented, separate channel inboxes.
The founding team — Salandra previously held roles at IBM, Google, and joined Runtastic before its $240M acquisition by Adidas in 2015 — built a platform that consolidated conversations from WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, LINE, Telegram, WeChat, voice calls, email, and web chat into a single interface. As frontier large language models matured, Respond recognized that its deep messaging infrastructure was precisely the foundation that autonomous AI agents needed to operate at scale.
Today, the platform serves mid-to-large B2C businesses across healthcare, automotive, retail, education, and travel — industries where customers need to engage in dialogue before making a purchase. Respond's sweet spot is companies with 200 to 10,000 employees, where high-volume customer conversations are both a challenge and a direct revenue lever.
A Pricing Model Built for the AI Era
One of Respond.io's most distinctive competitive advantages is its conversation-based pricing model. While enterprise software incumbents typically charge on a per-seat basis — meaning revenue falls as AI replaces human agents — Respond bills based on the volume of customer conversations, regardless of whether a human or an AI agent is handling them.
This structural alignment means that as AI adoption accelerates, Respond's revenue grows rather than contracts. The CEO argues that legacy platforms built around email and phone were slow to embrace messaging: incumbents "bolted on" messaging capabilities as an afterthought, leaving a structural gap that Respond has been filling for nearly a decade.
The company is currently processing 2 billion messages per quarter, a scale that powers what Salandra calls the "data flywheel": more messages produce better AI, which attracts more customers, which generates more messages — a self-reinforcing cycle that widens the moat with each passing quarter.
"If I just look at the numbers, every day that AI becomes more prominent, we grow faster. We are not seeing what the public SaaS markets are seeing."— Gerardo Salandra, Co-founder & CEO, Respond.io
The Western Push: North America & Europe in Focus
Respond.io's current revenue mix tells the story of its next chapter. Roughly 30% comes from APAC, another 30% from Latin America, and 20% from the Middle East and Africa — leaving North America and Western Europe together contributing just 20%. Yet Salandra identifies both as the company's fastest-growing markets, with businesses in those regions now rapidly embracing messaging channels after years of lagging adoption.
To accelerate this geographic expansion, Respond plans to deploy capital across hiring, organic growth, and strategic acquisitions. The CEO has two types of acquisition targets in mind: bolt-on technologies that integrate natively into the existing platform, and established companies with strong customer bases and local teams in Europe and North America. Salandra confirmed the company is already in active talks with a handful of potential targets. Respond also received recognition at the inaugural TikTok Partner Innovation Awards in New York in May 2026, reinforcing its growing profile in Western markets.