LimeChat has raised $750K in its seed round led by pi Ventures and Stellaris Venture Partners. Well-known angels including Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Sujeet Kumar, Ramakant Sharma, Dilip Khandelwal and others also participated in this round. The startup had raised a pre-seed round from Titan Capital early last year. LimeChat plans to use this funding to further develop its product, strengthen its team and scale its go-to-market operations.
LimeChat was founded in 2020 during the Covid pandemic, which saw consumers and brands worldwide increasingly adopt digital commerce. The company enables direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands to drive up online sales conversations via its advanced Level 3 Conversational AI technology across chat mediums like WhatsApp, FB Messenger, and Instagram. Its platform aims to deliver a personalized and engaging store-like buying experience to the brand's customers.
This new generation of conversational technology has empowered brands to expand chat as a revenue channel with increased Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and reduced Cost-per-Conversion (CPC).
Nikhil Gupta, the co-founder of LimeChat, shed light on their origin story, saying, “When we started, the word 'chatbot' was an over-used term, and the value being delivered through them was very limited. We wanted to leverage our AI research background to develop cutting-edge Conversational Intelligence capable of delivering exceptional customer experiences. A year later, our systems can carry out complex end-to-end sales with the customer, at conversation rates unrivaled by any conversational tech on the global market.”
Explaining his views on the future of conversational marketing, Aniket Bajpai, the co-founder of LimeChat, said, “Chat has traditionally been seen as a customer support channel. However, we believe that in the next five years, commerce through chat mediums, or c-commerce, will be comparable if not higher than e-commerce revenues. We deeply analyzed 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.”
The startup is currently working with over 25+ D2C brands across the fashion, beauty and cosmetics, and health and wellness verticals. LimeChat has enabled its clients to increase conversion rates by 10x via its personalised automated conversational commerce platform compared to the typical website conversion rates. By leveraging its highly sophisticated AI engine, LimeChat has been able to automate upto 80% of support tickets for brands as compared to the industry standard of 40%.
Explaining the rationale behind the investment, pi Ventures Principal Shubham Sandeep stated “At pi, we back ventures solving large global problems using disruptive technology and LimeChat fits the bill perfectly. Conversational commerce is taking off as evidenced by over 100M business accounts across WhatsApp and FB Messenger. We believe LimeChat with its sophisticated NLP engine and advanced analytics will be at the forefront of this shift. We have been impressed by the vision and execution shown by Nikhil and Aniket and are proud to partner with them on this journey.”
Alok Goyal, Partner at Stellaris Venture Partners said “We are delighted to partner with the LimeChat team. Assisted commerce is a massive market ripe for disruption. LiveChat's differentiated, Level 3 conversational AI enables any chat medium to become a sales channel. Nikhil and Aniket have done exceptional execution and shown encouraging results in a very short period.”
