Sendbird raised $100M at a $1B valuation led by Steadfast Financial

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sendbird 100m steadfast

Sendbird, a reputed company that offers chat, video, and other interactive services to sites like Reddit, Paytm, Delivery Hero, Hinge, and others through a few lines of code, has closed a round of funding totaling $100 million.

With this money, Sendbird plans to continue enhancing the features of its platform to keep up with the evolving needs of the digital world. According to Sendbird, the company is valued at $1.05 billion as a result of the financing.

Currently, clients utilize Sendbird’s APIs to connect 150M people to one other and huge groups of users for text and video chats. A few services, like moderation and text search, are already offered by Sendbird around that fundamental feature. Sendbird’s CEO and creator, John Kim, stated that the company is considering introducing group audio discussions so that users may create their own Clubhouse clones.

Additional advancements, such as moderation, have seen a significant uptake, he added. The fundraising, which the business claims was oversubscribed, is being spearheaded by Steadfast Financial with participation from existing backers ICONIQ Capital, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Tiger Global Management, and Meritech Capital. 

Approximately two years have passed since Sendbird closed its Series B investment at $102 million, and the startup’s valuation looks to have more than quadrupled since then: PitchBook believes it was approximately $550 million in 2019. The business, which has offices in San Mateo, California, and Seoul, Korea, has already raised over $221 million.

Sendbird is one of a growing number of businesses who have recognized this trend and the ability to turn that functionality into a kind of commodity that can be included anyplace a developer chooses to do so via an API. Not just that, but also: Other players in this market include the publicly traded Twilio, the similarly named rival MessageBird, Stream,  PubNub, Sinch, Firebase, and several others.

In an interview, Kim stated that that we are focusing our efforts around transactions and payments, and logistics.  We are putting a lot of effort into creating the complete experience because engagement is closely related to it. Some of the new features will focus largely on transactions, while others will promote greater participation. With this investment, Steadfast partner Karan Mehandru will join the board and thinks there is still a tremendous possibility.

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