Respond.io, the Kuala Lumpur-headquartered customer conversation management platform co-founded by a Pakistani entrepreneur who grew up in Peshawar, has raised USD 62.5 million in a Series B funding round, in what stands as one of the more significant milestones in the story of a company built by someone who came of age entirely outside the environments that typically produce global technology businesses. The round was led by Camber Partners, with participation from Endeavor Catalyst and existing investors, and brings the company’s total funding to more than USD 69 million following its USD 7 million Series A in 2022. The new capital will support expansion into North America and Europe while also funding potential mergers and acquisitions in those regions.
Respond.io currently generates USD 35 million in annual recurring revenue, growing 169 percent year over year while maintaining a 30 percent profit margin, a combination of growth rate and profitability that is rare enough in the current venture environment to explain the scale of investor interest the Series B attracted. The platform powers 2 billion messages per quarter for more than 10,000 businesses in over 180 countries, including Toyota, British Airways, Radisson, Hertz, and Decathlon, with 99.999 percent uptime across a system that unifies WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, LINE, Telegram, WeChat, voice calls, email, web chat, and more than 16 additional integrations into a single platform with AI agents, automation, and customer relationship management capabilities.
The company was founded in 2017, originally under the name Rocketbots, and was built from the ground up by a founder whose path to this point was anything but conventional. Growing up in Peshawar at a time when Pakistan barely registered on the global technology map, with reliable electricity and internet connectivity far from guaranteed, the co-founder taught himself to code through C, Visual Basic, PHP, and JavaScript, building software for clients abroad long before he had any exposure to the startup world. A scholarship eventually took him to Hong Kong, where he met his co-founder, and the pair later set up operations in a Lahore coworking space where rent was affordable and engineering talent was strong. Several of the engineers hired in those early Lahore days remain with the company today at its Kuala Lumpur headquarters, a detail that speaks to something real about how the team was built and how it has held together through nearly a decade of growth.
Respond.io initially focused on consolidating fragmented customer conversations into a unified inbox and automating workflows. As large language models advanced, the company expanded into AI-native customer engagement infrastructure, introducing AI agents that can autonomously qualify leads and manage customer interactions, then hand off conversations to human operators when necessary. This evolution from a messaging aggregation tool into an AI-native revenue infrastructure platform is what positions respond.io within a category of enterprise software that is currently attracting significant investor attention, as businesses across education, healthcare, automotive, retail, and travel increasingly treat customer conversations not as a cost center to be managed but as a primary channel for driving commercial outcomes.
For Pakistan’s technology and startup community, the respond.io Series B carries a significance that extends well beyond the funding number. It is a concrete demonstration that founders from cities far outside the established startup corridors of Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad can build companies that reach global scale, attract tier-one institutional capital, and earn recognition from the largest names in technology including AWS, OpenAI, Meta, and TikTok. The founder’s own account of the journey, from self-taught coding in Peshawar to a USD 62.5 million raise a decade later, provides a reference point for the next generation of Pakistani founders in secondary cities who are currently at the stage he once occupied, looking for evidence that the world they want to build toward is actually reachable from where they are standing.
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