Conversational artificial intelligence startup Manychat Inc. said today it has closed on a $140 million growth capital fundraise as it looks to automate more social media interactions for brands, creators, e-commerce businesses and marketing agencies.

Today’s round was led by Summit Partners and saw the participation of other unnamed investors, bringing Manychat’s total amount raised to more than $163.3 million to date.

Founded way back in 2015, Manychat is something of a veteran in the conversational AI industry, which probably explains why its social chat application is already being used by more than 1 million businesses and social media influencers across more than 170 countries.

The startup has created a chat-based marketing platform that aims to automate creator and brand interactions to help them foster stronger and more impactful relationships with their audiences. Its platform uses advanced generative AI chat models to engage with followers across leading social media platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok and Messenger.

On Instagram and TikTok, it can respond to every single question, comment and story reply instantly, helping to nurture every interaction, attract more leads and drive higher conversions. WhatsApp and Messenger meanwhile, can be transformed into an official customer support channel, helping users to find answers to their questions, retrieve order information and discover new products.

Larger brands can link Manychat’s platform directly to their customer support systems, so customers can be handed off to human agents when they’re required to answer more specific questions or deal with complex issues and queries. In addition, it provides tools for analyzing, measuring and optimizing sales metrics across social chat channels. Brands can customize the “voice” of their automated communications to ensure it matches their style.

Manychat says social messaging automation is becoming increasingly “vital” because social media platforms have emerged as a major arena for global commerce, set to drive more than $100 billion in sales in the U.S. alone by 2026.

Liz Miller of Constellation Research Inc. agreed that conversational AI in social media is one of the most promising applications of generative AI technology, but she warned that brands must take care in how they implement it. If brands are too pushy in their social chat outreach, most people will be put off very quickly.

“There’s a fine line in social with regard to how these conversations and journeys are architected and orchestrated,” she said. “Companies must ensure that the conversation isn’t always about customer conversions and commerce-driven, because this is where human consumers will rebel against the machines.”

The startup’s co-founder and Chief Executive Mike Yan said its goal is to help brands and creators leverage generative AI to try and evolve every social media interaction into a meaningful customer relationship.

“We take pride in our ability to package and simplify foundational technologies for the benefit of our customers,” Yan said. “The more useful and effective our technology becomes, the more our customers can focus on delivering exceptional value in their space.”

To do this properly, Manychat believes it must do more than just interact with consumers, and start taking actions on behalf of companies using AI agents. That’s the main reason why the company was so keen to attract new funding, and it said a significant portion of the money raised will be used to fuel the development of these agents, though it was guarded about their exact nature.

Miller said she believes Manychat’s focus on AI agents is promising, as it represents the next big step for social chat applications, but it remains to be seen if the company can pull it off. “It needs to have the capacity to reason as well as the capacity to act,” she stressed. “These are the requirements of agentic automation, and we’re yet to see anyone truly deliver on that.”

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