Connectly allows businesses to easily create and send interactive and personalized marketing campaigns through WhatsApp at scale. This promotes a 2-way conversation (unlike SMS & e-mail), where prospects and customers can choose their buying journey, increasing engagement alongside conversions. Connectly also centralizes customer communications in a unified inbox - across WhatsApp, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram – enabling companies to segment their audience and make data-driven decisions based on its smart reporting.
Based in Delaware (United States), Connectly has a remote-first and international team. It was founded in 2020 by former Big Tech executives: Stefanos Loukakos, Connectly’s CEO, an engineering graduate between Stanford and Berkley, MBA at INSEAD, who after starting his career in investment banking (Société Générale and HSBC), held the position of County Director at Google for 5 years and then continued his career at Facebook (Meta), for more than 4 years, as Head of Messenger Business. Yandong Liu, Conneclty’s CTO, former CTO of Strava and engineer at Uber, managed the development of the architecture of the machine learning platform. Both, sharing a passion for messaging, saw a need for businesses to gain equity in conversational commerce, a market that is expected to become a $130B market by 2025, according to Forrester.
Having already several clients in LATAM, MEA and APAC, Connectly now finds a key interlocutor to expand its business in Europe, with Italian Angels for Growth, a leader in Italian Seed Venture Capital. IAG once again confirms its role as a trusted partner alongside world-class investors, including Unusual Venture, GFC, Marathon Venture Capital and Canary, in helping top-performing companies thrive.
$350,000 round, which inaugurates for IAG a new series of investments, so-called Hot Deals: a new disruptive process to support young and promising companies more quickly, exclusive rounds with some peculiarities, such as a top-notch team and the objective need for quick time in the early stages of investment. IAG at the center of the innovation ecosystem, in a changing world, where we can enhance what sets us apart: a community of professional business angels, entrepreneurs and corporates who share skills, capital and commitment to deliver value and attract the best talent.
Francesco Acabbi and Sergio Togni, IAG Champion in this investment: "It is very inspiring to support a company with a top-notch team like Connectly. Our challenge is to facilitate the development of a model that already works excellently in Latin America and Southeast Asia also in our continent using the network and channels of our Angels."
Stefanos Loukakos, Connectly’s CEO: "We are very excited to have IAG as our investors, as they will help us scale our business in Southern Europe. Connectly's goal is to help companies all around the world to reach their potential and loyal customers through their favorite channel, WhatsApp, which leads to unprecedented results. We're happy we can rely on them!".