SleekFlow, a Singapore- and Hong Kong-headquartered social commerce platform that has built a conversational AI suite for customer engagement targeted to Asian markets, said Wednesday it had secured an additional $7 million in funding. The money will be used to continue developing its AI, as well as to penetrate deeper into Southeast Asia and the Middle East and make inroads into Europe.
The startup’s fundraise and plans for growth underscore the rapid rise of social commerce — where sellers leverage platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok and YouTube to market their goods and find new customers, and consumers use the same social media platforms to discover and buy things.
Social commerce is currently growing faster than conventional e-commerce. The estimated market value of social commerce in the Asia Pacific region alone is expected to exceed $894 million by 2028, representing a 10.6% growth from 2022.
Within that, conversational AI is a big part of how social commerce has developed. Using AI-based chat functionality means sellers can scale their customer service to work with masses of users while still keeping their own operations lean. It also adds a programmatic layer to the process, with analytics giving them more insight into what works, and what does not, and when and to whom, and to automate different kinds of responses to different audiences accordingly.
The conversational AI industry is projected to reach $49.9 billion by 2030, up 24.9% from $13.2 billion in 2024.
Given the scaling imperative of not just social commerce but e-commerce overall, it’s perhaps unsurprising to hear that the conversational AI space is a crowded one. SleekFlow’s competitors include MessageBird, Respond.io, Gupshup, Omnichat, Trengo, WATI, Unifonic and Verloop.
Henson Tsai, the founder and CEO of SleekFlow, says that the startup sets itself apart from these and other rivals by way of more streamlined features. Those features include omnichannel capabilities (i.e., marketing to more than one platform and interface from a single dashboard), marketing automation, and a user-friendly flow builder that enables flexibility in creating unique chat experiences for each customer. Instant checkout capabilities include in-chat payment links, collaborative team features, built-in CRM platform integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce, and e-commerce functionality.
The plan is to expand its platform “with offerings underway for fully automated sales and support journeys in voice, calls and email to deliver unparalleled value to our customers across,” Tsai told TechCrunch.
The startup also recently appointed a new CTO, Gao Lei, an AI and big data veteran with more than two decades of tech leadership in Silicon Valley.
“Since the appointment of our chief technology officer, Gao Lei, a Silicon Valley veteran, we have significantly increased our engineering efforts to be at the forefront of innovative tech and advanced AI,” Tsai said.
SleekFlow is built on a multi-tier SaaS business model with an optional add-on for customers who want to also set up and run a WhatsApp Business messaging channel. The startup courts sales and marketing teams and is used by companies ranging from small teams to large businesses across the insurance, healthcare, telecom, and retail sectors. Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN), Delonghi, online furniture company Cellini, and Malaysia’s home consumer electrical appliance maker Khind are among its customers.
SleekFlow is operational today in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates. Of those, Tsai said that consumer behavior especially in Indonesia — which is projected to become one of the largest consumer markets by 2030 — has been rapidly shifting toward online shopping over traditional brick-and-mortar stores. High spending power in Saudi Arabia and the UAE means these regions are also likely to be key markets for social commerce, Tsai added.
Atinum Investment, a Seoul-based VC firm, led this latest funding round, with existing backers AEF Greater Bay Area Fund and Transcend Capital Partners also participating, alongside Moses Tsang, a former general partner of Goldman Sachs Group and chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia LLC. Previously, SleekFlow raised an $8 million Series A led by Tiger Global.
The company declined to comment on its valuation, but in addition to having raised $15 million to date, some other financial metrics to note are that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has increased to $8 million to $9 million as of June 2024 from around $1million to $2 million in December 2022. Its staff has also grown to 160 from 60, and customers have increased by more than 5,000 globally, Tsai told TechCrunch.