Charles has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Salesforce Ventures to become Europe’s leading conversational commerce as a service platform. Accel and HV Capital, who led the company’s seed round in 2021, also participated.
Charles is an all-in-one, conversational-first operating system that is bringing everything associated with ecommerce into WhatsApp and other chat apps. The company enables businesses to sell products, send newsletters and support customers with ongoing personalisation and deep system integration via chat. With the new funding round, Charles is further expanding its operations from Germany into key European markets and targeting larger enterprise clients.
Charles already sees several of its 100+ software customers hitting 7-digit WhatsApp revenues in 2022 and driving 10-40% of their sales via chat. In addition, clients have had more than 90% opening rates and 8x more revenue per recipient via WhatsApp newsletters than via email. Charles has been building up a new, fast growing revenue channel in times of recession.
Since its launch in 2020, Charles has received massive interest from brands of all sizes striving to join the mega trend of conversational commerce. More than 50% of Brazilians already buy goods and services via WhatsApp and WeChat transacted USD400 billion in China last year, in clear signs that cCommerce will play a decisive part in reshuffling commerce in Europe in the coming years, where the WhatsApp penetration rate is already at up to 91%.
