Technology

Manychat taps $140M to boost its business messaging platform with AI

Chatbots and other kinds of AI agents — and the companies that build them — may feel like a dime a dozen these days. But the truth is that, for both businesses and consumers, some may be infinitely more useful (and perhaps less dystopian) than others. Today, a startup that’s built a successful business around that concept is announcing a major growth round to expand its business. Manychat, which provides brands with a tool for managing and automating conversations and engagement across multiple messaging channels, has picked up $140 million led by Summit Partners.

The funding is coming on the heels of strong growth for the startup. Manychat today has around 1.5 million customers across 170 countries, with the client list including the likes of Nike, the New York Times and Yahoo (the current owner of TechCrunch) as well as individual creators and much smaller outfits.

CEO and co-founder Mike Yan said Manychat sends “billions” of messages annually on behalf of these users across TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and other chat platforms. The plan will be to use this latest Series B round of funding both to invest in R&D — in particular bringing more AI into the platform — as well as to boost the company’s sales, marketing and support globally.

Notably for a startup these days, Manychat is mostly profitable — mostly, because as Yan describes it, “We always operate on the edge of being kind of break even.”

Since launching a decade back in 2015, it has only raised around $23 million, mostly from this $18 million Series A round in 2019 led by Bessemer with participation from Flint Capital. (Manychat did not disclose what other investors are in this latest round beyond Summit.) The company is not giving out a valuation but it’s likely to be considerably higher than the modest $58 million post-money valuation PitchBook detailed for the Series A.

From Telegram to Instagram

Manychat’s trajectory mirrors both the rise of smartphone-based messaging apps over the last decade, as well as the growing opportunity around tooling for helping businesses to leverage that medium in a better way.

In 2015, the email inbox was starting to tip into becoming a spam-laden, tired, and over-used medium for businesses looking to use it for marketing.

Yan was coming off the back of a failed social app, and he himself was a Telegram user, one of a growing population of consumers using messaging apps for basic communications. When Telegram opened up its APIs, the lightbulb of inspiration went off for him and his co-founder Anton Morin.

“Telegram was actually one of the first western messaging apps to open up its APIs,” he recalled. “As users of Telegram ourselves, and we saw a clear job to be done.” Companies were using email to connect to users, he said, but that was not where users were spending time. “They should be using messaging apps actually to connect with customers, that’s where the new wave of communication is happening. That’s where the new consumer is.”

So he and Gorin built the first iteration of Manychat as a tool for creating chats for businesses on Telegram. It picked up enough traction to get them into the 500 Startups accelerator.

Then, when Facebook opened up its APIs for Messenger — making its own first-efforts to build AI chatbots — things really started to take off. By the time Manychat raised its Series A in 2019, it was already reaching 350 million users on the platform monthly with billions of messages and an enviable open rate of 80%.

Additional APIs opening up across other Meta-owned platforms as well as TikTok have boosted that growth. Users can still market on Telegram, too, Yan said, although these days that is just a small percentage of its traffic. For the record, Instagram is far and away the most engaged and active platform for the company today, Yan said.

Manychat’s founding and a large chunk of its growth preceded the rise of generative AI and the emergency of AI chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini, among others. In fact, the earlier descriptions of the product touted how it provided a “smart blend of automation and personal outreach” to customers, who were using its no-code platform to build chatbots to grow social followers, collect email addresses, respond to comments and set up flows via DM links to request products or more information on something.

Anchoring its product around encouraging further actions, Yan said, is what sets it apart from most chatbots on the market right now, including most GenAI chatbots.

Sophia Popova, the Summit partner who led the investment and is joining the board of the startup, believes that Manychat’s approach of building out an engagement layer that’s seen a lot of success so far makes it a solid bet for the next wave of activity on messaging platforms.

“Our thesis hinges on a greater proportion of commerce dollars going through social messaging apps,” she said in an interview. “You need to be always on and engaging 24/7. That is what customers expect and Manychat is hitting the nail on the head.” In contrast, she said, when considering the DNA of the AI chatbots — at least what is in the market today — “very few of them are geared towards personalizing conversation in a way that drives conversion to revenue.”

If you want a help desk chatbot, there are “myriad” tools out there, but actually very few that are engaging to sell or elicit other responses from users in the way that Manychat has done, she added.

Yet given the pace of development — and the drive that many of the AI startups have to generate revenue to offset their huge cash burn — this is a gap that may not be there for long, one reason why Manychat is working to build in more AI features to improve its offering.

Technology

The Case for Custom eLearning Platforms: Why Organizations Are Making the Switch

aloe vera plant on grey pot on table with MacBook Pro and iPad

The corporate eLearning market has exploded in recent years, growing over 800% since 2000. As the demand for eLearning continues to accelerate, more and more organizations are finding that off-the-shelf solutions cannot keep pace with their training needs. This has led many companies to make the switch to custom-built eLearning platforms tailored specifically for their requirements.

There are several key reasons driving the demand for customized eLearning tools:

Greater Flexibility and Scalability

Generic eLearning software packages often impose rigid constraints that limit their ability to adapt to an organization’s evolving needs. Meanwhile, the “one-size-fits-all” approach fails to support the personalized learning critical for employee development. Custom platforms provide flexibility to add and modify features to match ever-changing business goals. As companies scale training across global workforces, custom solutions built on cloud infrastructure can scale seamlessly to handle growing demand.

Deeper Integration Across Systems

Smooth integration with existing HR, LMS, and other business systems is critical for optimizing training workflows. However, off-the-shelf tools rarely integrate well, creating data and process siloes. Custom platforms can tightly integrate role-based learning paths with core business applications, sync user profiles, enable single sign-on, and more. This level of integration catalyzes more impactful training function.

Better Data and Analytics

Generic software severely limits access to data insights that drive improvement. Custom platforms unlock a trove of analytics on content consumption, learner progression, platform adoption, and real-time feedback. Integrated analytics dashboards and APIs allow businesses to derive deep visibility across the learner lifecycle. These insights help continuously enhance learner experience, target development gaps, and demonstrate direct training ROI.

Enhanced Learner Engagement

For modern learners accustomed to consumer-grade digital experiences, poor platform usability quickly erodes engagement. Custom designs allow companies to incorporate familiar features from popular apps and websites while optimizing for their audience. Adaptive learning approaches further personalize content to individual styles and needs. With modular component architecture, custom platforms stay on the cutting edge of new modalities like AR/ VR to captivate learners.

Brand and Culture Alignment

Off-the-shelf tools impose a generic and often disruptive experience that clashes with existing brand identity and culture. In contrast, custom platforms allow organizations to carry over familiar styling, voice, and workflow patterns. Consistency in experience preserves brand recognition while smoother onboarding leads to wider adoption across all employee groups. Over time, the platform can evolve alongside cultural changes as well.

While custom elearning tools require greater upfront investment, for enterprise training needs, the long-term benefits far outweigh the costs. The ability to mold platforms to current and future needs results in greater leverage from learning spend.

As businesses demand ever-more from their learning technology, custom solutions provide the agility needed for true scale. Rather than forcing training functions into the constraints of generic software, custom elearning development keeps the focus on nurturing talent and capabilities. For any organization looking to drive workforce transformation through learning, custom elearning represents the way forward.

Technology

Pintarnya raises $16.7M to power jobs and financial services in Indonesia

Pintarnya, an Indonesian employment platform that goes beyond job matching by offering financial services along with full-time and side-gig opportunities, said it has raised a $16.7 million Series A round.

The funding was led by Square Peg with participation from existing investors Vertex Venture Southeast Asia & India and East Ventures.

Ghirish Pokardas, Nelly Nurmalasari, and Henry Hendrawan founded Pintarnya in 2022 to tackle two of the biggest challenges Indonesians face daily: earning enough and borrowing responsibly.

“Traditionally, mass workers in Indonesia find jobs offline through job fairs or word of mouth, with employers buried in paper applications and candidates rarely hearing back. For borrowing, their options are often limited to family/friend or predatory lenders with harsh collection practices,” Henry Hendrawan, co-founder of Pintarnya, told TechCrunch. “We digitize job matching with AI to make hiring faster and we provide workers with safer, healthier lending options — designed around what they can reasonably afford, rather than pushing them deeper into debt.”

Around 59% of Indonesia’s 150 million workforce is employed in the informal sector, highlighting the difficulties these workers encounter in accessing formal financial services because they lack verifiable income and official employment documentation.

Pintarnya tackles this challenge by partnering with asset-backed lenders to offer secured loans, using collateral such as gold, electronics, or vehicles, Hendrawan added.

Since its seed funding in 2022, the platform currently serves over 10 million job seeker users and 40,000 employers nationwide. Its revenue has increased almost fivefold year-over-year and expects to reach break-even by the end of the year, Hendrawn noted. Pintarnya primarily serves users aged 21 to 40, most of whom have a high school education or a diploma below university level. The startup aims to focus on this underserved segment, given the large population of blue-collar and informal workers in Indonesia.

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“Through the journey of building employment services, we discovered that our users needed more than just jobs — they needed access to financial services that traditional banks couldn’t provide,” said Hendrawan. “We digitize job matching with AI to make hiring faster and we provide workers with safer, healthier lending options — designed around what they can reasonably afford, rather than pushing them deeper into debt.”

Pintarnya Founders Press Kit — image credits: Pintarnya (Founders of Pintarnya Ghirish Pokardas, Nelly Nurmalasari, and Henry Hendrawan)

While Indonesia already has job platforms like JobStreet, Kalibrr, and Glints, these primarily cater to white-collar roles, which represent only a small portion of the workforce, according to Hendrawan. Pintarnya’s platform is designed specifically for blue-collar workers, offering tailored experiences such as quick-apply options for walk-in interviews, affordable e-learning on relevant skills, in-app opportunities for supplemental income, and seamless connections to financial services like loans.

The same trend is evident in Indonesia’s fintech sector, which similarly caters to white-collar or upper-middle-class consumers. Conventional credit scoring models for loans, which rely on steady monthly income and bank account activity, often leave blue-collar workers overlooked by existing fintech providers, Hendrawan explained.

When asked about which fintech services are most in demand, Hendrawan mentioned, “Given their employment status, lending is the most in-demand financial service for Pintarnya’s users today. We are planning to ‘graduate’ them to micro-savings and investments down the road through innovative products with our partners.”

The new funding will enable Pintarnya to strengthen its platform technology and broaden its financial service offerings through strategic partnerships. With most Indonesian workers employed in blue-collar and informal sectors, the co-founders see substantial growth opportunities in the local market. Leveraging their extensive experience in managing businesses across Southeast Asia, they are also open to exploring regional expansion when the timing is right.

“Our vision is for Pintarnya to be the everyday companion that empowers Indonesians to not only make ends meet today, but also plan, grow, and upgrade their lives tomorrow … In five years, we see Pintarnya as the go-to super app for Indonesia’s workers, not just for earning income, but as a trusted partner throughout their life journey,” Hendrawan said. “We want to be the first stop when someone is looking for work, a place that helps them upgrade their skills, and a reliable guide as they make financial decisions.”

Technology

OpenAI warns against SPVs and other ‘unauthorized’ investments

In a new blog post, OpenAI warns against “unauthorized opportunities to gain exposure to OpenAI through a variety of means,” including special purpose vehicles, known as SPVs.

“We urge you to be careful if you are contacted by a firm that purports to have access to OpenAI, including through the sale of an SPV interest with exposure to OpenAI equity,” the company writes. The blog post acknowledges that “not every offer of OpenAI equity […] is problematic” but says firms may be “attempting to circumvent our transfer restrictions.”

“If so, the sale will not be recognized and carry no economic value to you,” OpenAI says.

Investors have increasingly used SPVs (which pool money for one-off investments) as a way to buy into hot AI startups, prompting other VCs to criticize them as a vehicle for “tourist chumps.”

Business Insider reports that OpenAI isn’t the only major AI company looking to crack down on SPVs, with Anthropic reportedly telling Menlo Ventures it must use its own capital, not an SPV, to invest in an upcoming round.