People prefer texts over phone calls — especially when it’s a company on the other side. According to one survey, two-thirds of consumers say they’d switch to a company that offered texting as a contact option.
With the text-message marketing industry expected to grow to $12.6 billion by 2025, it’s not surprising that vendors like Blip (formerly Take Blip), which help organizations manage their text messaging campaigns, are riding high. Blip says over the past few years, its customer base has grown to more than 4,000 brands, including GM, Dell and Claro.
Founded around 25 years ago by Roberto Oliveira, Daniel Costa, Sérgio Passos, Marcelo Oliveira and Antônio Oliveira, Blip today connects brands and customers across apps and platforms such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, RCS and iMessage.
Of course, the business looked a lot different when it started off in 1999. Smartphones as we know them didn’t exist, and apps like WhatsApp and Instagram hadn’t even been conceived of.
The company started as a cellphone store, then got into ringtones. Then at the start of the chatbot craze in 2014, it pivoted again to conversational marketing.
“There’s no doubt that the interface for digital experiences was shifting towards conversational formats,” Oliveira said in a statement. “We’ve shown brands that social and conversational networks are much more than just communication channels; they are operational systems capable of engaging, selling, and delivering customer support with remarkable results.”
In its latest incarnation, Blip helps companies set up AI-powered chatbots to answer questions and transfer customers to human reps for more complicated requests. Built-in tools let brands create conversation flows, track sentiment, and add things like payments support for conversational commerce.
“Using Blip’s platform, brands can implement a feedback loop that ensures each new interaction with customers will get
better in the future,” Oliveira said. “Our aim is to assist our customers in identifying areas for improvement in their conversational applications, ultimately enhancing user experiences.”
Blip also provides detailed analytics to monitor customer reps’ performance — a feature some reps might have an issue with. One poll found that the pressure of answering customer requests weighs on the mental well-being of more than four in five service reps, with three-quarters reporting that having daily or weekly ticket targets increases their stress levels.
Oliveira emphasized that the monitoring features are optional and can be customized depending on a brand’s needs.
Take Blip competes with Glia, Bird, Gupshup, Voxie, Emotive, and others in the crowded text-based marketing sector. Connectly, backed by Alibaba, is another rival, as is Postscript, which focuses on e-commerce.
Still, Blip has grown steadily, notching annual revenue of more than $100 million in 2022. The company says its customers have created more than 300,000 chatbots using its tools, and it facilitates over 50 million conversations a day through social messaging apps.
Blip, which was bootstrapped until early 2020, this month closed a $60 million Series C funding round led by Softbank, with participation from Microsoft — a rare direct investment. The new cash brings the company’s total capital raised to $230 million, and will be put toward international expansion and product development.
“In 2022, we made a dual commitment to our board of directors and shareholders: to maintain our path of sustainable growth while also aiming for positive cash flow in the fourth quarter of 2023,” Oliveira said. “All our achievements and decisions have allowed us to enhance the company’s efficiency and productivity, enabling us to grow profitably — one of our top priorities. In 2023, we resumed generating cash, and we are now in a more comfortable position: we are growing and generating cash flow.”
Mergers and acquisitions might be in the works, too. In 2022, Blip purchased Stilingue, a platform that uses AI to monitor texts across marketing channels. And in 2023, it bought Gus, a Mexican firm in the conversational AI space.
Blip has more than 1,500 employees and offices in Brazil, Mexico and Spain. It’s headquartered in São Paulo.
Latin American companies are becoming increasingly attractive to venture investors, thanks to a growing talent pool and demand for middle-class-friendly services. According to the Association for Private Capital Investment in Latin America, the Latin American venture capital market reached its second-highest level on record in 2023, continuing a three-year-long trend.
