[imagesource:here]

You may never have heard of Clickatell, and that’s fine.

US investors certainly have and they’ve just shelled out $91 million (around R1,4 billion) in a Series C round of funding.

The cash injection was announced yesterday, with the company saying the funding will be used to expand its footprint in the US, and scale up its sales and marketing “on the back of growing demand from leading brands”.

Clickatell was started in a small Cape Town apartment by Pieter de Villiers (not to be confused with the rugby coach), the company’s CEO, his twin brother, and two friends in 2000.

Although it is now headquartered in California and has offices in Canada and Nigeria, its biggest contingent of developers remains in Cape Town.

Business Insider SA reports:

In 2000, Clickatell came up with the first solution for sending SMSes from the internet, which opened up a range of interactions between companies and cellphone users. It later helped WhatsApp set up a verification system that didn’t require email.

More recently it has focussed on services such as “chat banking”, or banking via WhatsApp. Such services are particularly attractive on a continent such as Africa, where phones are far more numerous than computers, it says – and Africa remains large in its ambitions.

Clickatell’s list of customers includes heavyweights like Coca-Cola, Deloitte, IKEA, Standard Bank, Capitec, and others.

In the statement announcing the funding, the company said it has “earmarked over 200 positions with a strong focus on boosting its African skills complement in the coming months”.

Where to from here? According to TechCrunch, there is massive room for growth:

Last September, Clickatell, in partnership with Visa’s fraud management platform, Cybersource, launched Chat2Pay to deliver chat commerce and make contact-free payments for businesses in the U.S…

The global contactless payment market worth $12 billion in 2019 is expected to reach $52 billion in the next five years. And the partnership will see Visa merchants and partners in 190 countries access the newly launched platform.

Clickatell claims to have delivered double-digit profitable growth for more than a decade.

Allen Taylor, Endeavor Catalyst’s managing director, called Clickatell “an inspiring example of how a company from South Africa can pull the future forward”.

Always good to see a local success story.

Onwards and upwards, chaps.

[sources:businsidersa&techcrunch]