Why Gallabox Thinks WhatsApp Is The Future Of Sales And Marketing

What’s the best way for businesses to communicate with customers, both new and existing? Chennai-headquartered start-up Gallabox thinks it makes sense to prioritise the digital channels that consumers prefer to use themselves – and for hundreds of millions of people worldwide, that means WhatsApp.

Gallabox, which is today announcing the successful completion of a $3.5 million funding round, has therefore staked its business on a marketing platform that enables small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to manage all their sales and marketing activity within WhatsApp. “The goal is to ensure SMEs can take control of their customer conversations,” explains Karthik Jagannathan, CEO and co-founder of the company with Yogesh Narayanan and Yathin Panchanathan.

The idea is that all leads flowing through to the sales and marketing team from customer contact of any nature – from responses to social media campaigns to customer inquiries – automatically end up in Gallabox’s WhatsApp platform. The solution includes an artificial intelligence agent that can deal with simple and straightforward leads, while other cases can be dealt with by the business’s employees.

By simplifying in this way, consumer-facing businesses should miss out on far fewer opportunities, Jagannathan argues. “SMEs leave no stone unturned when it comes to generating leads but they often have a great deal of difficulty turning these leads into sales,” he says. “Often, the customer conversation gets clogged up in the business’s systems and tools; so much more opportunity is lying beneath what is visible to the naked eye.”

WhatsApp is the key to resolving such problems, Gallabox believes. Not only does it provide SMEs with a single platform through which to manage all conversations, it’s also the tool that customers themselves are most accustomed to using. The platform can also be used to target customers who have bought from the business in the past – with WhatsApp campaigns that target repeat purchases, for example.

Launched in 2021, Gallabox has grown quickly. The business acquired 100 customers in its first 100 days and has built on that rapid start. By the beginning of 2025, it served more than 10,000 businesses in 45 countries – with India, the Middle East and Latin America particularly prominent.

That commercialisation has been achieved with relatively little investment. Today’s fundraising takes the total amount of finance raised by the company to just $5 million. “We’ve deliberately been frugal, but we do now see an opportunity to accelerate,” Jagannathan says.

Indeed, Gallabox believes the combination of three trends now provide it with a stronger tailwind than ever. “SMEs are seeing this seismic shift in the usage of AI, they’re moving from analogue marketing channels such as emails and SMS to WhatsApp and Instagram, and they’re no longer confident that customer relationship management software is fit for purpose.”

The company’s investors share this vision, with today’s funding round led by FUSE, with participation from existing investors Prime Venture Partners and Neon Fund.

“The world is standardising on WhatsApp as the modern communication and engagement platform,” argues Kellan Carter, founding partner at FUSE. “Gallabox enables companies to meet their customers exactly where they are – with a holistic marketing, sales and commerce suite on top of WhatsApp.”

Sanjay Swamy, managing partner at Prime Venture Partners, picks out the company’s ability to “allow SMEs to effortlessly create and deploy AI agents and workflows that automate customer engagement, enabling business owners to concentrate on their core operations”.

Gallabox intends to use the funding to step up its go-to-market activity, particularly in the US, where WhatsApp usage is now growing rapidly. The company has opened an office in San Diego to capitalise on what Jagannathan describes as “our next bastion of growth”.