Founded in 2016 by Nick Argyros and Chris Green, GotBot is a social commerce and customer experience solution that enables  clients to easily communicate with customers, through WhatsApp, Facebook  Messenger, Twitter, WeChat, Skype, SMS, and web chat conversations.

Clients  include Toyota, RCS, African Bank, Nissan, Flight Centre, Sanlam, Home  Choice and Old Mutual Finance, and the startup, which has a sharp focus  on the financial services, insurance and retail sectors with clients in  South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Dubai, has expansion plans into the  UK and Southeast Asia in “the near future”.

This expansion will be assisted by a ZAR2.5 million (US$171,000) funding round raised from venture capital firm CapaciTech towards the back end of last year.  But the initial breakthrough into the space came from getting people to  order and pay for coffee via text.

“This brought about the  realisation that if it could be done with coffee, it could be done with  anything, be it apparel, shoes or technology,” Argyros told Disrupt  Africa.

The company built its first product, Get It, and then  pivoted with a flagship product called Custom Care, which helps clients  with acquisitions, lead generation, on-boarding, FICA and customer  experience.

Now, with the GotBot team split between Johannesburg  and Cape Town, it specialises in conversation and workflow automation  across multiple messaging platforms, providing a single dashboard that  aggregates each channel with its own inbox.

“The system can be  used to create two way communications or build automation for different  business objectives such as lead generation, acquisitions, sales and  retail as well as customer experience,” Argyros said.

From the  founders’ experiences in application development, they had begun to  realise apps were “dying out”, and started looking at the next big  thing.

“Based on market behaviours such as the fact that 62 % of people prefer messaging over speaking to someone over the phone,  we realised that automation via these channels could replace a lot of  the mundane tasks and give clients what they wanted on the channels that  they preferred using. We understand that clients are going to message  businesses, so for us it is simple – let them,” said Argyros.

“We  can onboard clients and handle customer experience with ease, through  chat on a medium they understand. We built a platform that allows our  clients to build a solution that is tailored to their requirements.”

Self-funded  initially, Argyros says it was a “massive achievement” to have managed  to get the business off the ground organically for the first two and a  half years.

“We have just signed this Series A round of funding  with CapaciTech and we already have other offers on the table for future  rounds of funding,” he said.

GotBot is a Software as a Service  (SaaS) business with revenue coming from licensing fees and  commission-based structures on lead generation. It is seeing strong  revenue growth, and is poised for an expansive future.

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