Conversational messaging startup Hubtype closes a round of seed funding to fuel the development of their powerful framework. The expanding startup was founded in Barcelona in 2016 with the goal of leading enterprise businesses beyond chatbots and into the conversational messaging era.
The startup has grown 300% year over year for the last two years and was recognized as the Best Chatbot Startup at last year’s International Chatbot Summit in Berlin. Hubtype is now closer than ever to achieving its goal after raising €1 million in seed funding from K Fund, a leading VC firm in Spain, with the further participation of business angels from Hubtype’s prior round in 2016.
Jaime Novoa, associate at K Fund, stated: “The chatbot industry has undergone a major transformation from text to conversational apps, and Hubtype is leading enterprise companies to build the best customer experiences in a scalable way by using automation. Companies must move from traditional phone and email communication and into a new era of multichannel conversational messaging. Hubtype is an important addition to our investment portfolio, and timing is key.”
Hubtype is quickly becoming a fundamental tool in the software stacks of enterprise level companies in industries like banking, insurance, and e-commerce. With almost half of its customer base ranking in the Forbes Global 2000 List, Hubtype has achieved a strong position in the market for enterprise level tools to create great experiences on messaging to handle everything from customer service to sales.
The Hubtype framework makes the process of building and deploying a chatbot easy, allowing clients to seamlessly integrate with messaging channels, including webchat, which makes scaling new messaging channels like WhatsApp possible.
Hubtype is one of less than 50 official WhatsApp Business Solution Providers in the world, and is based in one of WhatsApp’s top markets globally. The company is one of only a handful of WhatsApp’s official providers that offer a combination of automation, virtual agents, and human agents on the popular messaging app.
“With our framework you can build, manage and scale enterprise conversational experiences and deploy a unified customer experience across all messaging channels including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, web chat, and more,” said CEO and co-founder of Hubtype, Marc Caballé. “Using Hubtype’s opensource framework, Botonic, which is based on React.js, conversational apps can be created and scaled easily, and with a streamlined set of tech skills.”
“With this funding round we’re investing in further developments of our framework, including AI capabilities which will allow clients to train their chatbot in 1 language and roll out automatically in about 100 languages. We’ll also be building our developer relationship program and scaling our sales team,” Marc Caballé added. “We started Hubtype to give enterprises the tools they need to move into messaging and bridge the communication gap with their customers, and that’s the important challenge we’re solving.”
Conversational messaging experiences take the best of chat and combine elements of graphic user interfaces, AI, decision trees, webviews, human agent hand-off and more. Integration with APIs, NLP services, CRM systems and other elements that enterprise companies need all contribute to providing a natural experience that customers desire.