Skip to main content

SendBird adds voice and video to popular chat API

SendBird has built a highly successful business with a chat API, but the company never intended to stop there, and today it announced it was adding voice and video capabilities to its communications platform.

“We’re creating more of an interaction platform to allow not just text messaging, but also voice calling and video recording capabilities on top of our platform. So it becomes a more comprehensive offering,” CEO and co-founder John Kim told TechCrunch.

The new tools are built on an IP-based delivery system, so it doesn’t touch telephony, according to Kim. That should help give it some differentiation from another popular communications platform, Twilio.

Kim says that his company is currently number one in the chat API space, delivering 100 million interactions per month. This involves primarily powering chat in on-demand services like ride hailing and food delivery, and also online marketplaces and communities. More recently, Kim says he is seeing an uptick in digital health applications, something that is bound to continue as telehealth options abound as a practical way to get medical advice during the COVID-19 crisis.

Adding voice and video will definitely add to the resources required to deliver these services, but Kim says they have built the platform to handle it. “One of the things that clearly differentiate us from the rest of the market was our ability to scale. So we haven’t had any issues from the technical side of things with the increasing demand,” he said.

The company plans to bill for these services by the minute, which Kim says is an industry best practice for voice and video. SendBird lets developers add these capabilities with just a couple of lines of code, offering a similar value proposition to companies like Plaid (recently sold to MasterCard), Twilio and Stripe. It saves developers from having to build these capabilities themselves.

The company was founded in 2013, and was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2016 cohort. The company has over 200 employees today and has raised over $120 million, according to PitchBook data. Pitchbook pegged the company’s valuation at more than $287 million as of last May when it announced a $50 million Series B extension that brought the total Series B to $102 million.

SendBird snags additional $50M for messaging API tool, as it extends Series B to $102M



from Startups – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3akibcB
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thousands of cryptocurrency projects are already dead

Two sites that are actively cataloging failed crypto projects, Coinopsy and DeadCoins , have found that over a 1,000 projects have failed so far in 2018. The projects range from true abandonware to outright scams and include BRIG , a scam by two “brothers,” Jack and Jay Brig, and Titanium , a project that ended in an SEC investigation. Obviously any new set of institutions must create their own sets of rules and that is exactly what is happening in the blockchain world. But when faced with the potential for massive token fundraising, bigger problems arise. While everyone expects startups to fail, the sheer amount of cash flooding these projects is a big problem. When a startup has too much fuel too quickly the resulting conflagration ends up consuming both the company and the founders and there is little help for the investors. These conflagrations happen everywhere are a global phenomenon. Scam and dead ICOs raised $1 billion in 2017 with 297 questionable startups in the mix. The
Post a Comment
Read more

Dance launches its e-bike subscription service in Berlin

German startup Dance is launching its subscription service in its hometown Berlin. For a flat monthly fee of €79 (around $93 at today’s exchange rate), users will get a custom-designed electric bike as well as access to an on-demand repair and maintenance service. Founded by the former founders of SoundCloud and Jimdo , the company managed to raise some significant funding before launching its service. BlueYard led the startup’s seed round while HV Capital (formerly known as HV Holtzbrinck Ventures) led Dance’s €15 million Series A round, which represented $17.7 million at the time. E-bike subscription service Dance closes $17.7M Series A, led by HV Holtzbrinck Ventures The reason why Dance needed so much capital is that the company has designed its own e-bike internally. Called the Dance One, it features an aluminum frame and weighs around 22kg (48.5lb). It has a single speed and it relies on its electric motor to help you go from 0 to 25kmph. And the best part is that you
Post a Comment
Read more