Taiwan-based Cooby raises $2.9 mn funding led by Sequoia India’s Surge, Pear VC

Taiwan-based conversation management tool Cooby today announced that they have raised $2.9 million to date led by Sequoia India’s Surge and Pear VC.

In a messaging-first world, the tool helps businesses streamline engagement and individuals to organise their customer conversations and boost inbox productivity. Cooby is Surge’s first startup founded and based in Taiwan.

With over two billion active users across the globe, WhatsApp is one of the world’s most popular apps. An increasing number of sales teams are using the platform to engage new prospects and existing clients. Sales conversations happen through messaging apps because customers prefer more collaborative and real-time communication. Businesses understand this, but many struggle to engage their leads and existing clients through WhatsApp and other messaging platforms. They grapple with issues like data ownership, transparency, visibility, activity tracking and legal protection due to the lack of data integration on WhatsApp.

Cooby equips these teams with WhatsApp work number setup, data sync, analytics dashboard, alerts and notifications, and collaboration interface to regulate WhatsApp and enhance their sales. The company also provides visibility to customer conversations and sales activities on a unified platform. Cooby Workspace makes collaboration on WhatsApp possible without all the back-and-forths, aggregate all customer contacts, and provides clear and actionable analytics that enables teams to track, improve and grow, it said in a press statement.

“Since October 2021, we have expanded our customer base to Germany, India, Indonesia, Singapore, and the US. Additionally, in the last three months, we’ve seen the user base of our WhatsApp inbox productivity Chrome extension grow by 350 percent, and it is now being used in 80+ countries. We look forward to further strengthening our Cooby Workspace product with the funds raised, on top of expanding our team to countries like Singapore and other parts of the world,” said Wen Shaw, CEO and Co-founder of Cooby.

Cooby was founded in November 2020 by Jocelin Ho and Wen Shaw in Taiwan. Ho graduated from Stanford with a Master's in Electrical Engineering and most recently, worked as a Tech Lead at Instagram and Facebook. Her previous experience includes roles at Google, Ericsson and Gogolook. An alumnus of Columbia University, Shaw has worked as a Product Manager at Facebook, Dropbox along with other experiences at IBM, Touch of Modern and Percolata.

Cooby is part of Surge's sixth cohort of 20 companies that build fresher, smarter solutions to help consumers and businesses adapt to a changing world.