Clerk Chat Inc., a startup building a messaging platform that integrates with major telecommunications carriers, today said it has raised $7 million in seed funding.

The San Francisco-based firm plans to use the cash to improve its messaging capabilities and strengthen relationships with telecom providers. The company was born from the limitations of conventional short messaging services, which are linked to phone numbers assigned by carriers.

Enabling enterprise messaging at scale is difficult because “you have to tie into those providers,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Alexander Haque. “It’s a challenging process because there’s a lot of legacy infrastructure to deal with and [application program interfaces] to build out.” Enterprise messaging services either don’t integrate with telecom carriers or require customers to do the heavy lifting, he said.

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Igor Boshoer noted the problem when he worked at Docusign Inc., which had separate numbers for inbound calls and text messages. “The underlying problem had not been fixed to consolidate the phone numbers and make it super-easy for the consumer,” he said.

Clerk Chat plugs its messaging AI chatbot directly into telecom infrastructure to allow any business phone number to be used for two-way text messaging with SMS, Meta Platforms Inc.’s WhatsApp and Apple Inc.’s iMessage. Companies can send mass messages from a single phone number, and customers can text message any phone number within the company.

The company is taking aim in particular at Twilio Inc., the $4 billion integrated communications provider. Though Twilio supports SMS communications, “they’re several layers removed from the telco,” Haque said. “They don’t have full control over the telecom stack, so if you want to change anything with a voice on the back end, you’re out of luck.”

Relationship builders

Clerk Chat said it has meticulously crafted relationships with Verizon, T-Mobile US Inc., AT&T Corp., Sinch AB and Infobip Ltd. and integrated with major communication platforms such as Teams, Zoom, Webex, Salesforce, HubSpot and Global Relay to enable text messaging from within them. The company already serves millions of messages daily.

The platform is certified compliant with Service Organization Controls 2 Type 2 and uses Vanta Inc.’s automated compliance platform. Its also highly resilient, Haque said. “By connecting directly into the [public switched telephone network] we have all the messaging and call logs so when messaging fails, we can stand it back up,” he said.

The company believes it’s in the right place at the right time. U.S. companies have been slow to adopt SMS as a standard communications protocol because of the difficulty of integrating with public phone networks.

“In Europe, everyone uses WhatsApp but in the U.S.,  you never see ‘text us for help,’” Haque said. “Voice has diminished as a channel and text messaging is now the norm.”

Clerk Chat’s platform supports mass texting, personalized messaging and two-way texting. A conversational assistant can handle commenting queries automatically and a generative artificial intelligence back end can create personalized text messages based on customer data.

Haque and Boshoer said the funding will be used to expand AI capabilities, build out the company’s engineering team and expand telco partnerships. Funding was led by Race Capital LP with participation from Hacker Fellowship Zero , Mento Master LP’s venture capital fund VC and Altair Capital Management LLC’s venture arm.

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