Artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot startup, LimeChat, on Tuesday said it has raised $750,000 as part of its seed round led by pi Ventures and Stellaris Venture Partners.
Well known angel investors including Flipkart chief executive officer, Kalyan Krishnamurthy; Udaan co-founder, Sujeet Kumar; Livspace co-founder, Ramakant Sharma; along with Dilip Khandelwal also participated in this round. The Bengaluru-based startup had also raised a pre-seed round from Titan Capital early last year.
According to the company, it plans to use this funding to further develop its product, strengthen its team and scale its go-to-market operations.
The year-old startup enables direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands drive up online sales conversations with customers by directly selling across chat mediums including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. Through a chat interface, the platform aims to deliver a personalised and engaging store-like buying experience to the brand’s customers.
“We believe that in the next five years, commerce through chat mediums will be comparable if not higher than e-commerce revenues. We deeply analysed why customers drop off from an e-commerce website. It turns out most customers are unhappy with the information overload and involved decision-making needed to buy from an online website. Limiting our focus solely to the e-commerce vertical enabled us to engineer the tailor-made contextual interactions which these customers desire,” said Aniket Bajpai, co-founder of LimeChat.
At present, the startup is currently working with over 25 D2C brands across the fashion, beauty and cosmetics, and health and wellness verticals. LimeChat claims to enable its clients to increase conversion rates by 10x via its personalised automated conversational commerce platform.
“We are delighted to partner with the LimeChat team. Assisted commerce is a massive market ripe for disruption. LimeChat’s differentiated, conversational AI enables any chat medium to become a sales channel,” said Alok Goyal, partner at Stellaris Venture Partners.
