There are multiple messaging apps active in Southeast Asia and most consumers prefer to use them over email when they contact a business. Respond.io serves as a central dashboard for the biggest apps, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line, Viber, Telegram and WeChat. The Malaysia-based company said today it has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Headline, with participation from AltaIR Capital, Smart Partnership Capital, Sterling Oak Group and Calendula Ventures.

Respond.io is currently used by more than 10,000 companies, including Klook, Decathlon, Abenson, Yoho, Roche, ShareChat and Bigo.

Respond.io’s dashboard, which processes over 140 million messages per month, consolidates all the messages a business gets, so the right person can see them. It also includes marketing, selling and support tools and can perform automated workflows, like building chat menus, drip campaigns, internal pipelines and invoking external actions. One benefit of using a central dashboard is that managers can quickly see if a conversation has been dropped and revive it.

Since its last round of funding in January 2020, Respond.io has grown its revenue 25x. Its latest funding will be used to continue attracting large enterprises by adding more to its suite of integration capabilities, and expanding beyond Asia to the Middle East, Europe and Latin America.

Respond.io was launched in 2017 by Gerardo Salandra, Hassan Ahmed and Iaroslav Kudritskiy to serve as an omni-channel messaging inbox. Its product-first strategy means Respond.io develops its platform using feedback from its customers. It has a public roadmap and hundreds of customers can vote for the features they would like to see, helping Respond.io prioritize deployments.

For example, it recently localized Respond.io in Spanish because about 30% of its customer are in Spanish-speaking countries, and a high number voted for the platform to be available in Spanish.

Another example is its Contact Merge tool. Since customers often message from multiple channels, this means their chats were being dispersed across different profiles on the platform, Salandra said. The Contact Merge tool uses an algorithm to identify returning customers, even if they start using a different channel for messages.