Conversational commerce platform Gallabox raises $3.5M in seed round led by FUSE

Gallabox has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by FUSE, with additional participation from existing investors Prime Venture Partners and Neon Fund. This funding brings the company’s total capital raised to $5 million.

The newly-raised capital will be allocated to strengthen its product capabilities and expand its global footprint, said the company. 

Founded in 2021 by Karthik Jagannathan, Yogesh Narayanan, and Yathin Panchanathan, Gallabox enables SMBs to deploy enterprise-grade AI automation on WhatsApp, serving over 10,000 businesses across 45 countries.

The platform emerged from the founders' first hand experience with thousands of SMBs struggling with challenges in managing customer communication and scaling growth. Recognising that lead-generation efforts often remained manual and inefficient despite significant investments, the team set out to develop a solution to address these pain points.

"My co-founders and I have spent a decade working in a local services marketplace. We saw that businesses were just getting digitised, figuring out how to build their leads pipeline, along with other processes. The closest analogy I can think of is an iceberg: while they were generating leads, most of the work was happening after receiving the leads. This is where conversations would happen, and over time, some leads would get curated while others didn’t get the attention they deserved. It was largely a manual process. Some small businesses had CRMs or some ways of maneuvering through this chaos — but many didn’t," Karthik Jagannathan, CEO and co-founder of Gallabox tells YourStory. 

“We understood that the conversation before the conversion mattered most, and we realized we could help them by automating this. This is a golden era where AI meets messaging. Small, medium sized businesses (SMBs) are the missing middle in any pyramid in any country. Our goal is to democratise these solutions and make it available to the vast majority of them,”he adds. 

Traditional customer communication channels, such as email, SMS, and phone outreach, are becoming less effective, causing businesses to lose millions in potential revenue. The startup seeks to transform how businesses utilise WhatsApp for marketing and sales, offering a streamlined approach to customer engagement.

By the end of FY25, the company aims to onboard over 25,000–30,000 businesses to automate and manage customer conversations.

"India contributes 40% of our revenue, driven by the large opportunity we aim to leverage.. The remaining 60% comes from other regions, with the Middle East accounting for 40% of that, followed by LATAM (Latin America) and other markets. The US holds great promise and potential, with a few customers already onboard," Jagannathan adds. 

Several businesses worldwide, particularly in regions where WhatsApp is the primary communication platform, are keen to adopt this high-ROI channel as part of their growth strategies. While large enterprises can invest in custom WhatsApp automation solutions to drive conversations and close deals, small and mid-sized businesses have often been constrained to managing interactions manually, resulting in substantial revenue losses. 

To solve this, Gallabox offers an end-to-end WhatsApp automation platform. Through its no-code approach, businesses can create AI chatbots for lead qualification, deploy drip marketing campaigns, and coordinate team efforts using shared inboxes. From broadcast messaging and automated appointment scheduling to personalised service recommendations, Gallabox helps automate every phase of the customer interaction funnel.

“The world is standardising on WhatsApp as the modern communication and engagement platform. Gallabox enables companies to meet their customers exactly where they are—with a holistic marketing, sales, and commerce suite on top of WhatsApp. Thrilled to partner with Karthik, Yogesh, Yathindhar, and the entire Gallabox team as they shape the future of business-to-customer communication,” said Kellan Carter, Founding Partner at FUSE. 

With offices in California, Dubai, and India, Gallabox signed its first 100 customers outside the founding network within just 100 days of inception. Since then, the platform has served over 10,000 businesses across 45 countries, catering to service-driven sectors such as education, healthcare and wellness, real estate, and travel.

To drive its rapid international expansion, the company has set up dedicated teams in the Middle East and Latin America. It has also recently established a presence in the US, further extending its global reach.

“Karthik, Yogesh, and Yathin have proven to be an exceptional team throughout the two years we have worked together. Their relentless focus on execution and great product made it an easy decision for us to double down on our commitment,” said Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner, Prime Venture Partners. 

Going forward, Gallabox plans to expand beyond pure WhatsApp automation and become a full-scale AI-driven sales and marketing platform for SMBs across multiple messaging channels. The company is building advanced capabilities that will allow businesses to train AI agents using natural language instructions, enabling them to handle complex tasks.