Sendbird

Sendbird is a communications and AI customer-experience platform for enterprises. Its original and still-core offering is a set of chat and messaging APIs, SDKs and UI Kits that let developers embed in-app chat, voice and video into mobile apps and websites without building the underlying real-time infrastructure. Chat capabilities include 1-1, group, supergroup and public channels, typing and read/delivery receipts, presence, push notifications, threads, polls, reactions, mentions, scheduled and offline messages, message search, and automatic or on-demand translation. Moderation and trust features cover a moderation dashboard, automatic image moderation, profanity and domain filters, user blocking/banning/muting, spam flood protection and channel freezing, complemented by analytics, data export and webhook integrations.

More recently Sendbird has positioned itself around AI. Its delight.ai product is described as an AI concierge delivering personalized experiences across the customer journey, and its AI agents are designed to automate ticket resolution and FAQs, engage customers proactively, and hand off to human agents when needed. Alongside these, the company offers omnichannel business messaging spanning in-app chat, SMS, email, WhatsApp and social messaging channels, with the stated aim of shifting volume to cheaper in-app channels. Solutions listed include an AI agent, support desk, Salesforce connector and content moderation.

The company reports serving customers across delivery and rideshare, e-commerce and retail, healthcare, travel and hospitality, and financial services, and cites enterprise-grade infrastructure with 99.9+% uptime, sub-40ms latency, and SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA and ISO 27001 compliance.

Founding story

Founded in 2013 by a team including John S. Kim, the company began as a B2C community app for mothers. Kim had previously started one of Korea's early startups and founded Paprika Lab, a social gaming company that was acquired. When the mom-community app stalled at a few hundred thousand users and the company was running low on cash, other entrepreneurs asked to license the chat backend the team had built in-house. After a short hackathon to package it, the team signed roughly two dozen paying customers within a couple of months of private testing, applied to Y Combinator at the end of 2015 and pivoted fully to the chat API business around the YC Winter 2016 batch. The company had four co-founders and about 10-11 people at the time of the pivot; other named founders are Brandon Jeon and Harry Kim.

Business model

Sendbird sells B2B software: communications APIs, SDKs and UI Kits that developers embed into mobile apps and websites, alongside AI agent and omnichannel business-messaging products. Distribution combines self-service sign-up (a free build tier and developer free trial introduced ahead of the 2021 Series C) with an enterprise sales motion supported by white-glove onboarding, implementation and technical support. Early pricing was set ad hoc — the first customers paid roughly $49–$50 and then $150 per month — before the company scaled into enterprise accounts.

Subscription/usage-based SaaS pricing for chat, messaging, voice/video and AI agent products, sold both self-service and through enterprise contracts. The sources do not disclose current pricing tiers or revenue figures.

Traction

Company-published figures state 300M+ monthly active users, 7 billion+ monthly messages/conversations, 6 billion people reached, and more than 4,000 apps using its chat API. At the April 2021 Series C the platform had over 150 million monthly users and 2.5 billion monthly messages and hundreds of customers. Y Combinator lists a team size of 300 and total funding of $220M+.

Latest developments

Sendbird's current positioning centers on AI: it markets delight.ai, an AI concierge for hyper-personalized customer experiences, alongside its communications APIs, and articulates an 'agent-to-agent' (A2A) vision in which AI agents connect businesses and individuals. Its CEO describes building delight.ai as an AI agent platform for customer service. Recent metrics published by the company cite 300M+ monthly active users, 7 billion monthly conversations/messages, 6 billion people reached, and $220M+ in total funding, with a team size of about 300.