Pieter de Villiers - Afrikan Heroes

South African Chat Commerce Platform Clickatell Raises $91m To Explore US

February 23, 2022

Clickatell, a pioneer in the mobile communications and chat commerce field that enables businesses engage with their customers through mobile messaging platforms, has announced a new funding round of $91 million.

“In many ways, we’ve kind of had to wait for the market to come to us because if you have the first mover, you can also get too far ahead of the pack and find yourself in a desert,” Pieter de Villiers, the company’s founder and CEO, said, on the company’s journey from enabling client contact via chat to payments. “We had to wait for things like the WhatsApp channel to open up. And two years ago, we were the first company in the world to launch payments initiated out of WhatsApp and chat banking.”

Arrowroot Capital led the Series C round, which comes a decade after the Sequoia-backed company raised its last round, with Kennedy Lewis Investment Management, Endeavor Global, and Harvest also participating.

The Series C funding will be used by Clickatell to extend its presence in the United States, scale its sales and marketing operations, and expedite the development of its chat commerce product in South Africa and Nigeria.

Clickatell raised $12 million in a Series B investment in 2011 from Sequoia Capital and other investors to go beyond customer involvement and include payments in one of its many services.

Why The Investors Invested

The company has seen significant growth since its founding two decades ago. For instance, for more than a decade, Clickatell claims to have produced double-digit profitable growth. It has processed over 30 billion interactions and 2 billion commerce transactions since 2020, according to the business. Clickatell covers 17 million end customers in Nigeria alone, with up to 1.3 million payment transactions every day.

“Clickatell is an inspiring example of how a company from South Africa can pull the future forward. Clickatell was the pioneering company that successfully first sent messages from the internet to mobile phones, and today they power some of the biggest names in communications, like WhatsApp,” said Allen Taylor, Endeavor Catalyst managing director, in a statement.

The California-based company sought funding to go public in the United States in 2019, but given its recent private capital round, that listing has yet to happen. Clickatell’s chief executive de Villiers explained that the 22-year-old company needs safe capital to test new products “in a field that is just beginning,” but he is optimistic that the company’s next round will be public.

A Look At What Clickatell Does

Clickatell was founded in South Africa in 2000 and is based in California, with operations in Nigeria and Canada. Pieter de Villiers, the firm’s founder and CEO, stated he founded the company to interact with the internet, which is the fastest-growing commerce platform, and the mobile phone, which is the fastest-growing communications platform.

As a result, Clickatell became the go-to API interface for businesses to send messages to their clients, resulting in significant increases in customer engagement via SMS.

Consumers can use its platform to find goods and services, make purchases, track orders, and address concerns with brands via SMS and USSD (in Nigeria) and WhatsApp (in South Africa).

Through its chat commerce integration with ABSA Bank, one of South Africa’s top banks, the firm claims to have created one of the world’s first conversation banking solutions on WhatsApp.

Chat2Pay was introduced in September by Clickatell in collaboration with Visa’s fraud monitoring platform, Cybersource, to enable chat commerce and make contact-free payments for businesses in the United States. The cooperation expands the payments giant’s acceptance of payment options other than credit cards and physical point-of-sale terminals.

“We believe that chat commerce has the potential to be larger than e-commerce for the simple reason that already today, there are more people on chat than the internet, in fact almost twice as many. And so when Visa thinks about the future, and how do they serve their customers across multiple payment instruments, they decided to partner with us,” he said.

This alliance has a massive market opportunity. In the next five years, the global contactless payment market, which was worth $12 billion in 2019, is predicted to grow to $52 billion. Visa merchants and partners in 190 countries would be able to use the newly released platform as a result of the cooperation.

Clickatell chat ecommerce Clickatell chat ecommerce Clickatell chat ecommerce

Congo-based Startup Jambo Secures $7.5m To Build Web3 Super App For Africa

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer

In 2022, Brands Will Prioritize Chat Commerce to Improve the Consumer Experience

December 10, 2021

Clickatell , a leader in mobile communications and Chat Commerce , collaborated with senior executives across the CPaaS, CCaaS, and Digital Commerce industries to predict the stand-out trends for 2022. The responses point to the consolidation of all three sectors into a single new sector called Chat Commerce.

The pandemic has accelerated digital transformation efforts, resulting in a multi-billion dollar Chat Commerce market opportunity. Consumers live in their chat apps and brands are now moving beyond desktop, mobile websites, branded apps, and email, and increasingly leveraging business messaging as the channel of choice to engage with customers for support, engagement, and now payments (https://bit.ly/3DF4bIf).

Pieter de Villiers, CEO and Co-Founder at Clickatell.

“Chat Commerce is the third wave of digital commerce, following on from eCommerce and app commerce,” said Pieter de Villiers, CEO and Co-Founder at Clickatell. “More than 7.7 billion people use some form of chat several times a day, making chat the largest digital engagement channel in the world. With COVID-19 accelerating digital commerce adoption and businesses fast tracking their digital transformation to meet consumers where they are, we can expect an increased demand for and deployment of Chat Commerce services and experiences.”

According to CMO Council’s report Chat Commerce Resource Center Instant Interaction Driving Business Traction (https://bit.ly/3ycZPXU), “Chat Commerce has become one of the fastest-growing global phenomena. No other channel of engagement has this kind of relevant and repeatable impact. The market opportunity for Chat Commerce is virtually unlimited, and brands have only begun to tap into its potential.”

Based on market and proprietary research, and conversations with leaders in the industry, Clickatell predicts the following for 2022:

Brands will meet customers where they are, in chat apps

Consumers will avoid call centers and new app downloads to get things done instantly by connecting with brands in their chat apps. Consumers will reach brands easily and conveniently from anywhere 24/7 and buy things simply with Chat Commerce. For example, a consumer traveling on a plane may connect with the airline from his address book to upgrade his seat through chat. The consumer may place an order and make a payment in real time, using a card on file or their airline rewards card in the chat app they are also using to communicate with friends and family while waiting to board.

Clickatell customer Eswee Vorster, Executive Manager and CIO at top South Africa airline FlySafair, said, “I think chat is a potential gamechanger for us going forward. It is a kickoff for us to know our customers better, and to attain valuable data and a single view of a customer, which is crucial. I am very excited about the future and to engage better with our customers.”

Chat Commerce equates to no more downloads: Brands extend services through chat platforms that customers already love

Consumers across generations, not just Gen Z and millennials, will continue to communicate and manage their lives in chat. Brands will invest to serve their customers within the chat channel their customers already use.

Brett StClair, Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist Officer at TeraFlow and member of Clickatell’s Insight Circle (https://bit.ly/3GzZguj), noted, “Understanding a customer’s journey down to a microdata point is where meaningful improvements can be made. By analyzing the data that resides within each company’s ambit, companies can isolate the microdata needed to build exceptional customer journeys. If brands are able to create customer journeys that are so deeply personalized, why would they miss the opportunity to deliver them over their customers’ preferred channel? Choosing chat is the logical first step in a successful customer experience strategy.”

Chat Commerce means supersized personalization: Digital engagement allows for exponential personalization

Brands will add more personal, targeted, and relevant communications around their checkout experience. Chat Commerce enables buying, paying, and selling through more personal interactions between the consumer and merchant, including automated, intelligent chatbot-powered interactions.

Alec Wright, Chief Product Officer at OneValley and featured in Clickatell’s Insight Circle (https://bit.ly/3IEExXM), elaborated, “What’s been really exciting in Digital Commerce, both on the payment side and the banking data side, is all of the pipes that have been built over the last five to ten years. To that end, every brand is starting to operate like a bank and offer financial services. I believe over the next five years we’re going to see the payments infrastructure and the banking infrastructure become as easy and user-friendly as food delivery is today.”

In its recent report “Add Digital Payments as Part of Communications Platform as a Service Offering,” Gartner® recognized Clickatell as a “Who’s Who in CPaaS Payments and How They Are Going About It” and stated, “Currently there are a limited number of CPaaS providers that provide the payment capability [1].”

As a Gartner Representative Vendor, obtain a complimentary copy of the September 2021 Gartner (https://bit.ly/3dFHglA) Market Guide for CPaaS report [2] here (https://bit.ly/3EHw8At). Learn more about Clickatell’s Chat Commerce Platform here (https://bit.ly/31TPJ2c).

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

Clickatell Announces Chat Commerce Platform with New Payment Capabilities

October 14, 2021

Clickatell, a leader in mobile communications and chat commerce, announced it will unveil new payment capabilities via its Chat Commerce Platform at Money 20/20 Las Vegas, Oct. 24-27. Clickatell helps businesses easily deploy payments in chat channels with low to no execution risk associated with regulatory considerations, payment ecosystem of payer and payees, and consumer adoption on the most popular chat channels.

In its report “Add Digital Payments as Part of Communications Platform as a Service Offering,” Gartner® recognized Clickatell as a “Who’s Who in CPaaS Payments and How They Are Going About It” section and stated, “Currently there are a limited number of CPaaS providers that provide the payment capability.” Additionally, Gartner’s report predicts “by 2025, around 50% of CPaaS vendors will enable the functionality as part of their communications modules and offerings.”1 Starting in 2011, Clickatell already recognized the need for chat commerce and moved to the model that combines communication and commerce. Currently, Clickatell processes 1.5 million transactions daily.

“With billions of consumers actively chatting on chat apps, we believe Chat Commerce is the future of digital commerce enabling brands to connect, interact, and transact where their customers are,” said Pieter de Villiers, CEO and co-founder at Clickatell. “Paying a utility bill should not take 15 minutes of your life every month. Imagine a utility company sending a simple notification in chat to customers for the amount due giving them the option to tap and pay the bill right there from within the notification itself. And, if the customer has a query, we enable brands to leverage a bot or live agents then and there in the same channel. Consumers no longer have to scramble to find a number to call or fire off an email into the abyss.”

Clickatell’s enterprise grade Chat Commerce Platform improves brands’ customer experience and drives revenue by personalizing communications, delivering higher customer satisfaction and retention, increasing sales, improving business efficiencies, and reducing operating costs. It provides low/no code tools for brands to connect, interact, and transact with their customers:

Connect enables messaging and notifications, such as a bank sending a customer a credit card transaction verification alert, which is much less intrusive or inefficient than a robocall or an email;

Interact provides back-end system integration and orchestration complete with a chat bot and agent desk enabling a bank, for example, to communicate with customers interactively to check balances or pay bills versus calling an 1800 number on the back of a card; and

Transact supports API payments and digital transactions capabilities through Clickatell’s new Chat 2 Pay. Chat 2 Pay enables businesses to securely accept payments in chat messaging by sending consumers a payment link via SMS or WhatsApp. In its design of Chat 2 Pay, Clickatell efficiently has orchestrated the complex relationship between messaging, payments, and the order management system (OMS) of their customers, and in the process mitigates the risk of businesses managing payment card details.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

South African Youths Get Boost From DigiLink Incubator

June 14, 2021

Pieter de Villiers, chairman of SiMODiSA and co-founder of Clickatell.

South Africa’s DigiLink incubator programme has launched with the goal of upskilling unemployed youths, enabling them to enter the tech economy and secure long-term employment.

The Incubator which was launched by the Harambe Youth Employment Accelerator, SiMODiSA and Clickatell, provides participants with access to 12 months of on-the-job training in a simulated work environment that provides mentoring and training to fulfil available entry-level jobs.

Over two-thirds of young South Africans are not employed or trained within 12 months of exiting the schooling system, and 75 per cent of them have no work experience, yet jobs are available in the ICT sector and DigiLink is looking to bridge the gap by providing necessary skills and experience.

“Intra-sector partnerships have proven successful for both job and economic growth in other sectors. I’m encouraged that the digital sector is beginning to coordinate itself in the same way,” said Evan Jones, group strategy director of Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator.

“DigiLink candidates are currently fulfilling some of Clickatell’s QA activities which we used to do in the US and Canada, proving that not only can young South Africans do the work if mentored and supervised appropriately, but also that we can re-shore this kind of work and associated revenue,” said Pieter de Villiers, chairman of SiMODiSA and co-founder of Clickatell.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry