Participated · Series B · Sep 2024

Connectly.ai builds an AI-powered conversational commerce platform that personalizes text messages and automates conversations across messaging channels including WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, and web chat. Its AI is fine-tuned on a retailer’s product catalog and plugged into the brand’s online store to send alerts about price changes, stock, offers, and to build audience segments. The platform automates follow-ups such as cart-abandonment messages with discount codes or lower-cost shipping offers. The company says its bots always identify themselves and that it is compliant with GDPR opt-out requirements. Connectly serves over 300 paying customers and reported $3.5 million in revenue last year, having grown revenue 5x the prior year; it expects revenue to grow 100% in 2024 to roughly $7 million by year-end. Founded in 2020 by Stefanos Loukakos and Yandong Liu, Connectly faces competition from Attentive, Twilio, Infobip, Bird, Take Blip, and Yalo. The company operates with a San Francisco-based workforce of 65 employees and plans to grow to nearly 80 by the end of the year. Connectly.ai provides marketing services that simplify enterprise workflows by turning customer information into structured data flows. The company enables businesses to deploy AI-driven mini-bots to create and send interactive, personalized marketing campaigns at scale. Its platform focuses on automation and personalization to help enterprise users scale marketing communications. In December 2023 Connectly.ai completed an $18 million Series A financing. The raise was led by Volpe Capital with participation from DST Global and RX Ventures. Connectly.ai provides conversational commerce software and is a WhatsApp Business Partner Solution focused on simplifying how companies transform customer messages into revenue. Its no-code tool enables businesses to create and send interactive, personalized marketing campaigns through AI-powered mini bots at scale. The platform centralizes customer communications in a unified inbox across WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram, and offers audience segmentation and smart reporting for data-driven decisions. The company was founded in 2020 by former Big Tech executives Stefanos Loukakos and Yandong Liu. Connectly.ai already serves several clients across LATAM, MEA and APAC. It intends to use the newly raised funds to expand its business in Europe.

Participated · Series B · Sep 2024

Connectly operates a code-free conversational commerce platform that uses proprietary AI models to automate two-way personalized messages across messaging channels including WhatsApp, Instagram, and RCS. The platform lets businesses create interactive campaigns and use AI to automate conversations across sales, marketing, customer experience, and support. In 2023 the company launched Sofia AI, an AI product recommendation assistant, and introduced an AI Search product for businesses. Connectly says it nearly doubled its revenue and headcount over the past year and entered the U.S. market after its Series A in October 2023. Founded by Silicon Valley veterans in 2020 and based in San Francisco, the company focuses on helping retailers increase conversions, engagement, and customer satisfaction through messaging. Connectly plans to continue investing in its proprietary AI models and to scale its conversational commerce offering globally. Connectly provides a platform for businesses to create messaging campaigns and automate conversations with customers across messaging apps, using chatbots and outbound/inbound workflows. Its AI uses natural language processing and machine learning to build audience segments, prioritize inbound messages, and recommend products. The product can detect events like cart abandonment and tailor messages or offers (discounts, shipping) to recover sales, and it displays audiences and campaign performance in a unified dashboard. The company was founded by Stefanos Loukakos (former head of Meta’s business Messenger division) and Yandong Liu (former lead ML engineer at Uber) in 2020. Connectly reports a customer base of roughly 200 brands and annual recurring revenue just above $3.5 million. It competes with incumbents such as Twilio and startups like MessageBird and Attentive and plans to grow headcount from 35 to about 40 by year-end 2023.

Led · Series A · May 2024

Welbe is a Mexico City-based healthtech company that provides employers with a comprehensive health ecosystem through an intelligent occupational health management system. Its offering is coupled with a minor medical expense program that generates data to help reduce medical costs and employee absenteeism. Led by CEO Eduardo Medeiros Cardoso, Welbe packages these services for companies to take care of their employees. The company plans to use new funding to expand operations and accelerate product development. Welbe recently raised $7M in a Series A to support its growth plans.

Participated · Series B · May 2024

Aplazo is a four-year-old Mexican fintech that offers buy now, pay later and a virtual card to enable fractionated payments for both offline and online merchants, including consumers without credit cards. More than half of its transactions occur in physical stores, reflecting Mexico’s still-limited e-commerce penetration and an underbanked population (40% of users lack credit histories). The company embeds AI in underwriting to limit credit loss, cutting delinquency rates by half while more than tripling its business and tripling revenue in the past year. Aplazo says it is near cash-flow breakeven in the last couple of months and maintains a headcount of about 130 employees. Management frames BNPL as a stepping stone toward broader fintech ambitions to become a preferred payment method and deepen relationships with merchants and consumers. Aplazo integrates with merchants' online and offline payment processes to let customers pay in five equal installments without a credit card. The company takes on installment and chargeback risk while charging merchants a fee and preserving merchant–customer relationships. Aplazo emphasizes its offline capability (95% of purchases in Mexico are offline) and uses alternative data—open banking and telecom—to underwrite consumers with limited credit histories. Since its seed round, Aplazo has grown total processing volume more than eightfold and partnered with over 1,000 merchants in categories like fashion, footwear and beauty, which it estimates represent about $70 billion in spending. The team is approximately 50 people and plans to double headcount by February while launching in two additional countries in 2022. New funding will be used for technology and product development and investing in merchant success.

Participated · Series A · Jun 2022

Zippi designs credit products specifically for Brazil’s 21 million micro-entrepreneurs, tying credit limits and repayment schedules to the actual retail cash flow captured through Pix transactions and other data sources. The company’s product supplies revolving working capital that adapts to daily sales patterns, aiming to replace one-size-fits-all consumer loans traditionally offered to small merchants. Management plans to double the business in 2025 and, by the end of 2026, expects to process about R$10 billion in cumulative transactions while managing R$350 million in its credit fund (FIDC). Previous FIDC issuances totaled R$66 million in 2024 and R$80 million in 2025. The newly strengthened capital structure is intended to widen the active customer base and grow per-client volume while maintaining portfolio quality and lowering funding costs. Zippi is led by CEO and co-founder André Bernardes and CFO and co-founder Bruno Lucas, and remains focused exclusively on the Brazilian market.