Chennai-based commerce platform Gallabox raises nearly ₹10 crore in seed funding

The platform helps small and medium businesses, who do not have the budgets to build mobile apps, increase their sales through WhatsApp

Chennai-based Gallabox by MangoLeap Private Limited, a conversational commerce platform which helps Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) increase their sales through WhatsApp, has raised $1.2 million (₹9.78 crore) in a seed funding round.

The funding was led by Prime Venture Partners with participation from 100x Entrepreneur Fund. Angel Investors, including Pallav Nadhani (ex-CEO, FusionCharts), Abhishek Rungta (Indus Net Technologies), SV Swaroop Reddy (ex-SPI Cinemas), and Siva Rajamani (Co-Founder & CEO, Everstage) also participated in this round.

In December 2021, this startup was selected in the second edition of the Tamil Nadu Startup Seed Grant Fund and received a ₹5 lakh grant from the State government.

Founded by Karthik Jagannathan, Yogesh Narayanan and Yathin Panchanathan, Gallabox enables SMBs to manage their sales conversions on WhatsApp, putting an end to poor conversions and broken customer experience using legacy tools. Since its inception in 2021, Gallabox has had a roster of more than 500 customers including PVR, Pickyourtrail, Credit Mantri etc. across D2C, education, health and wellness, financial and travel services in India and across 20 other countries.

With more than 2 billion users on WhatsApp and more than 500 million in India alone, coupled with SMS becoming increasingly spam-prone, businesses are fast discovering WhatsApp to be the best way to connect with their customers. While enterprises have the resources to build interactive tools to communicate and transact with their customers on WhatsApp, small and medium-sized businesses do not have the budget or skill-sets to build these sophisticated tools. Gallabox claims that it can help such businesses.

India is home to 75 million SMBs with 20 million of them digitally influenced, according to a report by Zinnov. Acquiring customers digitally, SMBs spend enormous efforts and marketing budgets to generate leads, but struggle to convert them because of opacity of customer conversations, multiple touch-points, and dependence on sales team-members to provide updates. There is no way to keep track of prospective conversations, streamline them to the right team-members, get transparency to customer interactions, enable greater team collaboration, and finally take the prospect to closure. Most SMBs cannot afford to develop interactive experiences like a mobile apps, unlike large companies. Gallabox intends to address this gap in this particular market.