Yellow Messenger, the world's first cognitive engagement cloud - a conversational AI platform for automating customer and employee engagement, today announced a $20 million Series B investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lightspeed India Partners.

Yellow Messenger enables enterprises to automate and orchestrate workflows for customer and employee engagement with minimal human intervention, utilizing chatbots across multiple communication channels like Microsoft Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, telephony, digital assistants and integrated with the enterprise's existing System of Record and System of Engagement. These engagements can be carried in over 120+ languages across voice and text. By acting as a single source of intelligence across all channels, and across customer and employee conversations, Yellow Messenger ensures smart, consistent and coherent customer and employee experience.

The Yellow Messenger platform is powering 30 million monthly conversations on chatbots, across more than 100 customers around the globe, including Accenture, Dominos India, Flipkart, Grab, MG Motors, Royal Enfield, and Xiaomi India. The company has also forged deep go-to-market partnerships with Microsoft, TCS, WhatsApp, Facebook and more.

The fresh capital will fuel international growth across the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific markets. In addition, the company will invest further in its product innovation roadmap, including deepening multi-lingual voice bot capabilities, expanding enterprise integrations, and launching a developer marketplace for virtual assistants.

"In less than three years, Yellow Messenger has quickly established itself as a leader in conversational AI for the enterprise. We anticipate demand for the company's platform to accelerate as consumer expectations of real-time conversations with their brands deepen," said Amy Wu, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners.

"One in every three companies globally is implementing conversational AI and chatbots-the pull is irreversible. Ever since we met the Yellow Messenger team at our Lightspeed Extreme Entrepreneurs program in 2018, we have seen how the company has taken advantage of this market pull with its rapid time-to-value, transactional platform and multi-language support for global rollouts," said Dev Khare, Partner, Lightspeed India Partners.

"We've seen huge demand for our conversational AI platform since the very beginning, achieving 5X growth in bookings, year over year, since 2017," said Raghu Ravinutala, CEO & Co-Founder, Yellow Messenger. "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. This investment will help us scale our operations and speed track the R&D endeavors to service the surge in global demand for automation."

In response to COVID-19, Yellow Messenger, in partnership with Facebook Messenger, has been appointed by the National Health Authority of India to provide chatbots to several state governments (Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, and Rajasthan) to assist with citizen engagement over WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. The company has also deployed special chatbots for enterprises to deal with employee engagement, customer engagement, and ITSM automation, helping them drive business continuity.

Yellow Messenger has raised a total of $24 million to date, with Lightspeed India Partners previously leading a $4 million Series A investment in 2019.