Manychat, a startup providing tools for businesses to automate and streamline customer interactions across various messaging platforms, has secured a substantial $140 million Series B funding round led by Summit Partners. This new infusion of capital follows impressive growth for the firm, which currently supports about 1.5 million customers spanning 170 countries. High-profile clients include companies such as Nike, the New York Times, and Yahoo, as well as smaller operations and individual content creators.
According to CEO and co-founder Mike Yan, Manychat facilitates billions of messages each year across popular channels including Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, WhatsApp, and more. This fresh financing will primarily be channeled toward research and development, with a particular focus on deepening AI capabilities within their platform, as well as to expanding the company’s global presence in sales, marketing, and customer support.
Uniquely among many tech startups today, Manychat operates close to profitability. As Yan describes it, the company carefully maintains operations “at the edge of being kind of break even.” Having been founded nearly a decade ago-in 2015-Manychat had previously only raised approximately $23 million, with its largest prior investment being an $18 million Series A round in 2019, led by Bessemer and Flint Capital. While the enterprise did not disclose its current valuation, it is expected to greatly surpass the $58 million valuation following its Series A funding.
Manychat’s history aligns closely with the rise of messaging apps on mobile devices—a trend the founders appreciated early on. Yan, alongside co-founder Anton Morin, originally built the platform to capitalize on Telegram’s API, which was one of the first messaging apps to allow third-party integrations. Yan recalls seeing an obvious opportunity: businesses were traditionally using email marketing, yet consumers were rapidly embracing messaging apps as their communication preference. Recognizing this shift, Manychat began as a solution for businesses looking to connect more naturally and directly with their customers.
The company soon earned a position in the 500 Startups accelerator. Growth accelerated significantly after Facebook opened its Messenger API, allowing Manychat to scale rapidly. By the time Manychat completed its Series A round in 2019, the platform was already engaging 350 million monthly users through Messenger, generating billions of messages at an impressive open rate of around 80%. More recently, the expansions of APIs on additional platforms owned by firms such as Meta and the growth of TikTok have further accelerated usage and adoption of the Manychat platform. Today, Instagram is the single most active channel powering Manychat’s current growth.
Interestingly, Manychat’s early years preceded the generative AI revolution that brought forward technologies like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude chatbot. Instead, it initially promoted a balanced blend between automation and personalized outreach, leveraging a no-code environment that enabled brands to build engagement flows, collect customer information, automate responses, and drive customer interactions and purchases more effectively than email and traditional marketing channels. This focus on prompting actionable customer interactions and conversions sets Manychat apart from most contemporary AI chatbot solutions currently on the market.
Summit Partners’ Sophia Popova, who spearheaded this funding and is joining the company’s board, notes that Manychat’s strategy aligns strongly with the growing trend of commerce shifting towards social messaging platforms. “Customer expectations today are 24/7 responsiveness and engagement,” Popova emphasized, highlighting that few existing tools effectively drive revenue through genuinely personalized conversations the way Manychat does. However, she acknowledges that with the pace of AI development—and given the financial pressure on AI startups to rapidly commercialize their offerings—Manychat must innovate swiftly to retain its competitive advantage, a factor behind the company’s intensified investment into AI-driven enhancements going forward.
