The demand for conversational chatbot is increasing than ever before. Having said that, Bengaluru-based startup Yellow Messenger has raised a $20 million series B funding from LightSpeed Ventures to push adoption of its conversational AI platform.

This fund will also help the company to have international growth across the US, Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific markets.

Raghavendra Kumar Ravinutala, chief executive officer and Co-Founder of Yellow Messenger said, "We’ve seen huge demand for our conversational AI platform since the very beginning, achieving 5X growth in bookings, year over year, since 2017. With rapid advancements in voice tech, AI and multilingual capabilities, our product

has consistently offered a truly scalable solution by delivering meaningful and measurable results to enterprises across the globe."

Yellow Messenger had already marked presence into Southeast Asia, with its AI bots chatting available in over 120 languages, including Bahasa, Bengali, Cantonese, English, Hindi, and Thai. “We anticipate demand for the company’s platform to accelerate as consumer expectations of real-time conversations with their brands deepen," says Amy Wu, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Yellow Messenger has already built a track record with over 100 enterprise clients, integrating with their backend systems to power 30 million conversations monthly on multiple channels like WhatsApp, Slack and telephony. Partnerships with Microsoft and Accenture have also enabled it to plug into large digital transformation projects for organizations.

The startup is also looking to launch a developer marketplace for virtual assistants, which will enable third-party developers to create, launch, and distribute their own chatbots to Yellow Messenger clients.

Through a partnership with Facebook Messenger, the company said it has recently been appointed by the National Health Authority of India to provide state governments with chatbots to help with citizen engagement amid the Covid-19 pandemic, said sources.