AI platform Gupshup has axed close to 500 people over the past five months in what it claims is an effort to boost profitability and streamline operations. About 200 were cut off earlier this month, following a larger chop of 300 in December 2024.
The rapidly growing company that achieved a unicorn valuation in 2021 stated that the restructuring was intended to eliminate redundant roles and improve operational efficiency. Gupshup maintained that the layoffs were not concentrated among those businesses despite many of the affected employees coming from firms acquired during its expansion phase.
Acquisition Spree and the Road to Consolidation
From late 2021 to mid-2022, Gupshup moved assertively to boost its offerings and expertise via acquisitions. It picked up five companies, Dotgo, Knowlarity, Active.ai, AskSid, and OneDirect. These deals were funded by a USD 100 million Series F round led by Tiger Global, which pushed Gupshup’s valuation to USD 1.4 billion.
As the firm has moved from being an SMS-based service to being a full-fledged conversational AI platform that leverages WhatsApp, Instagram, and other chat interfaces, its acquisitions have had the aim of “strengthening its position in customer engagement.” But the gig of integrating the acquired companies’ forces into the existing company appears to have created a bit of overlap, resulting in the recent right-sizing.
In a statement, Gupshup said it is still investing in innovation and AI-driven solutions for businesses, despite the cuts, making tough choices to ensure long-term growth.
Investor Reactions and Valuation Concerns
The layoffs come on the heels of a substantial markdown in late 2024 by investor Fidelity, which reduced the estimated value of its stake in Gupshup by 65% compared to 2021. This implied a new valuation for Gupshup of around USD 486 million—down from their prior USD 1.4 billion peak. While Gupshup had reported in earlier FY23 earnings that they were up 55% year-on-year to USD 300 million, they have not yet reported full FY24 numbers, and investor confidence clearly took a hit with this latest valuation.
Speculation about more job cuts at Gupshup has been played down. The company has stated that it is profitable and has denied that any more rounds of layoffs are coming. But several internal sources say that another wave of layoffs, this time aimed at 100 to 300 employees, could be coming by June. No one is confirming that report, though.
In recent months, Gupshup has faced challenges, but it still has an eye on a potential public listing. CEO Beerud Sheth signaled this year that interest in the company has been expressed by investors in public markets. However, for an IPO to happen, the company needs to sort out some regulatory and logistical matters that have to do with relocating its headquarters from the U.S. to India.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations.
Bots are software created by developers that conducts automated interactions with people in real-time. A recent study showed that the number of users on messaging apps has exponentially increased. This is why more and more companies that are launched today are greatly relying on automated chats and chatting services to interact with their users or potential customers. This shift towards chatting indicates that the bot phenomenon is truly here to stay.
Every Fortune 500 company has a bot strategy. Gupshup is a bot-building platform that encourages the creation of advanced bots. Gupshup gives creators all the tools required in the bot development lifecycle. One can build their bots on the cloud and can deploy them in a single click into 25+ messaging and voice platforms including Facebook Messenger, Slack, Skype, Line, Google Home, and more.
Know more about Gupshup technology, Gupshup company, Gupshup funding, owner, revenue, challenges, and more, with this StartupTalky article.
GupShup – Company Highlights
Startup Name
GupShup
Legal Name
Webaroo Inc.
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
Industry
Information Services, Information Technology, Messaging, Bot Development
Founder
Beerud Sheth, Rakesh Mathur and Dr. Milind R Agarwal(Ex-Founding Executive)
Gupshup, formerly called SMS Gupshup, is a messaging service and bot-development company that is operating in India, the US, and the UK. It provides a wide range of services including SMS, email, Voice, USSD, and IP messaging to banking, financial services, and insurance retail companies, and chatbot development to the leading retail and e-commerce companies.
Founded in 2004, by Beerud Sheth, Dr. Milind R Agarwal, and Rakesh Mathur, GupShup has extensive experience in building bots for companies such as Unilever, SAP, Tata Sky, TITAN, Vogue, and many more.
“Gupshup is simply a conversational messaging platform. When you book a ticket or buy coffee, you receive a confirmation SMS or a credit amount due to notification on your phone. We are basically the platform that facilitates that,” remarked Gupshup CEO and Co-founder Beerud Sheth in an interview.
The company provides a range of bot-building tools. The IDE bot developer gives all the features of a full-fledged development environment right in the browser of the users. It is built on NodeJS and has multifile support, a customizable UI, and also a package manager. This also enables the users to make HTTP calls to external services very easily. Each bot also comes with its own database and helps in storing and retrieving data. The most powerful feature of the Gupshup IDE bot builder is the bot scripting tool that enables the creation of bot conversations via a simple English script.
The users can also build bots without the need for any coding via the Flow Bot Builder feature. The Flow Bot builder helps them get a code-free way of creating structured bots via a graphical editor. Besides, the Bot interactions can be fully customized to involve users. One can even create structured messages and add media content with just a few clicks.
GupShup – Industry
According to statistics, over 91% of Indian users use messaging apps today. Furthermore, the premium messaging market, which was valued at around $54,579 million in 2016, is estimated to witness a rise at a CAGR of 5.4% and would be reaching $78,349 million by 2023.
Besides, reports say that the global customer service software market is set to grow at a CAGR of 20.4%, which is expected to reach $2.5 bn by 2025.
Since its inception in 2004, the company has experimented with a variety of business models in the messaging space, beginning with a consumer-focused community text messaging service, then a moment messaging app, and finally an enterprise messaging business that provides customer and brand communication solutions for developers and large businesses in a variety of industries.
GupShup – Name, Logo and Tagline
“Gupshup” as the name implies, is an Urdu term for ‘having a conversation‘. GupShup is a leading smart messaging platform provider that enables better customer engagement through conversational messaging.
gupshup – Logo
Gupshup presented a new brand identity. The revamped website, updated tagline, new logo colors, and updated brand look-and-feel make up the new brand identity in March, 2022. These modifications support Gupshup’s goal of revolutionizing business-to-customer interactions and commerce in the future through conversational engagement.
New Tagline – “One-on-one. With everyone”
GupShup – Founders and Team
GupShup was founded by Beerud Sheth,Rakesh Mathur and Dr. Milind R Agarwal.
Beerud Sheth
Beerud Sheth is the Co-founder and CEO of Gupshup. An alumnus of IIT Bombay and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Beerud was a Computer Science student. Sheth started his career working with Citibank, where he was the AVP. He then worked with Merrill Lynch with the same designation before venturing into the startup world.
When the internet was the talk of the town and names like Google, Amazon, and many more echoed in the room, Beerud decided to not miss the opportunity of doing something new. He then co-founded Upwork, where he was the Co-founder and VP. After he left Upwork, Beerud founded GupShup right in the same year.
Beerud Sheth, co-founder and current CEO of GupShup
Rakesh Mathur
Rakesh Mathur is an alumnus of IIT Bombay from where he obtained his Btech ME, after which he pursued an MS in Engineering and Operations Research from The University of Texas. Mathur has been a serial entrepreneur for quite some time now. He founded Armedia and Junglee, where he served as the VP of Marketing and the CEO respectively. Mathur then became the VP of Amazon but for a brief period post which he founded Stratify, SnapStick, and JustChalo, where he served several key designations. After this he became the VP of Rovi.
Rakesh Mathur, Founder GupShup
The entrepreneurial journey resumed again for Mathur as soon as he left his job at Rovi. He again founded a string of companies including Droptalk, InfoNam, GupShup, percipient.ai, and WhiteRabbit.ai. Along with being the Co-founders of a bunch of companies, Mathur always believes in taking up key leadership roles for the same. Besides, Rakesh also has been a notable investor in the startup ecosystem where he even led seed investments in many of them.
Dr. Milind R. Agarwal
Known as the Founding Executive of GupShup, Dr. Agarwal has Manipal Institute of Technology as his alma mater, from where he completed his BTech degree in Electronics and Communication after which he went for an MBA from Michigan State University and then a Ph.D. degree from the University of Mumbai in Indian Philosophy and Management.
Dr. Milind R. Agarwal, Ex-Founding Executive, GupShup
On the work front, Dr. Agarwal has been the Director of Sai Transport Corporation, after joining GupShup as the Founding Executive. He eventually left the company in 2013, after more than 7 years. He then became the Founder and National Coordinator and eventually the Member of the International Advisory Board at the Michigan State University. Quickwork was the last company that Dr. Agarwal founded in 2015, where he is still serving as the CEO.
GupShup has somewhere between 10001 – 5000 employees who work for the company.
GupShup – Startup Story
Beerud started a company named ‘Elance’ with his two IIT Bombay classmates before he was approached by Rakesh Mathur, who was an accomplished entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Mathur and Beerud started a company named ‘Webaroo’ in 2014-15.
“Users could publish their thoughts like tweets, and people could follow them and receive messages,” Beerud explains. “Gupshup grew to 70 million users in India at a time when Facebook and Twitter had only one million users in the country.”
The company was a unicorn with its headquarters in the coveted Silicon Valley, was not a huge hit back then when it started its run. The startup was initially an SMS application, strictly, the business model of which revolved around subsidizing the cost of sending messages. Though the idea was successful, there were many regulations that prevented it from monetizing the application. This is why it hit a roadblock. Gupshup eventually changed its business model from consumer-oriented to enterprise-oriented, and since then, the company had to never turn back nor pause.
GupShup’ s mission statement says, “build the tools that help businesses better engage customers through mobile messaging and conversational experiences.”
“Our vision is a world where it’s as easy for consumers to interact with a business as it is to chat with a friend; where consumers can shop, buy, pay, book, learn, transact and interact with businesses through short, simple conversations,” said Beerud Sheth, CEO and Co-founder, GupShup.
GupShup – Business and Revenue Model
Though GupShup was initially started with a business model that revolved around the consumers, the company eventually changed its business model to focus on enterprises. This is how the company operates now where the businesses use GupShup’s application programming interface for customer interaction across more than 30 contact networks, including SMS. Developing chatbots, omnichannel inbox capabilities, conversational AI, and client-side apps to handle interactions are among the API services.
GupShup earns its revenues from mobile messaging services, and the facilities of mobile advertisement through text messages that it offers.
Operating revenue for Gupshup grew from INR 739.0 in FY21 to INR 1,132.1 in FY22. Regarding net profit for the company, it went up from INR 52.5 crore in FY21 to INR 39.9 crore in FY22.
Gupshup – Financial
GupShup – Products and Services
Click-To-WhatsApp Ads Manager
The Click-To-WhatsApp Ads Manager, a full-funnel application that enables companies to harness the power of CTWA, was revealed by Gupshup on August 4, 2023. This launch’s primary goal is to enable brands to amass relevant performance insights through accurate attribution.
Auto Bot Builder
Gupshup has introduced Auto Bot Builder on January 18, 2023, which creates sophisticated enterprise chatbots using GPT-3. The GPT-3 LLM (long language model) will be used by the tool, which will be tuned using its own enterprise knowledge base and domain knowledge.
GupShup – Funding and Investors
Date
Round
Amount
Lead Investors
July 23, 2025
Equity and debt funding
$60M
Globespan Capital Partners and EvolutionX Debt Capital
May 19, 2022
Private equity Round
$100M
Tiger Global Management
July 28, 2021
–
$240M
Tiger Global Management, Fidelity Management and others
Apr 8, 2021
Series F
$100M
Tiger Global Management
Jan 1, 2021
Venture Round
–
–
Aug 31, 2011
Series E
$10M
Tenaya Capital
Mar 2, 2010
Series D
$12M
Globespan Capital Partners
Oct 14, 2008
Series C
$11M
CRV, Helion Venture Partners
Dec 22, 2006
Series B
$10M
–
Jun 9, 2005
Series A
$1.1M
–
GupShup – Shareholding
Indian unicorns have experienced a slew of valuation reductions as a result of the ongoing macroeconomic problems facing the world, with SaaS unicorn Gupshup suffering the reduction. The value of Gupshup have reduced by 31.6% on March 23, 2023, according to US asset management firm Fidelity Investments. The SaaS startup is valued at about $957 million, down from its initial valuation of $1.4 billion made on April 8, 2021, during its Series F funding round.
Fidelity reduced the value of its position in Gupshup from $10.15 million at the end of May 2023 to $8.08 million at the end of June, 2023. The total value of Fidelity’s share in Gupshup has been reduced and making total valuation of $697 Mn recently, removing the unicorn label from the company as per news resources of July 31, 2023.
GupShup has won STAB Success Award 2023 designed by G7 CR and Microsoft at the STAB Success Awards.
Company won Partner of the Year Award on September, 2023.
GupShup – Acquisitions
GupShup acquired OneDirect on June 2, 2022. The customer engagement platform that is powered by AI was acquired in an all cash deal, according to which the founders and employees of the company will also be joining GupShup.
This acquisition of OneDirect marked the 4th acquisition of GupShup in 2022, which acquired AskSid, Active.ai, and Knowlarity Communications earlier in the same year. OneDirect, has offered services in over 10 languages and has served 1 bn+ customers to date. Indian Railways, Myntra, KFC, Indigo, and Airtel are some of the distinguished customers of OneDirect.
Knowlarity was acquired with an undisclosed amount on February 2, 2022, after which it acquired Active.ai on April 5, 2022, in a deal that involved mainly cash. Active.ai is a Conversational Banking as a Service (CBaaS) platform, headquartered in Singapore, which aims to make client communication easy with the customers.
The enterprise-tech unicorn has acquired 5 companies so far in its journey. Here’s taking a quick look at them:
Company Acquired
Acquired Date
Price
OneDirect
June 2, 2022
–
AskSid Technnology Solutions
April 20, 2022
–
Active.ai
April 5, 2022
–
Knowlarity Communications
February 2, 2022
–
Dotgo
September 23, 2021
–
GupShup – Challenges Faced
When GupShup (formerly called Webaroo) launched in 2007, mobile was the only means to communicate with many people. At that point (which was before the smartphone era) everybody used to use feature phones. The sole way to reach people on feature phones was via SMS.
GupShup developed a really noteworthy idea of an SMS application but that was found to be increasingly difficult to monetize back then. “We could neither subsidise nor monetise. The platform was great; the scale was engaging, but we could not afford the model,” he shares. This is the time when the company changed its business model and began to build an enterprise-oriented model, and success followed.
GupShup – Future Plans
As per the reports of July 28, 2021, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Beerud Sheth stated that the company is looking for a US listing in the forthcoming year. He has further mentioned that GupShup will be buying back shares from its employees and early investors. Fast forward to April 5, 2022, after it acquired Active.ai, Beerud stated that the company would most likely be launching its IPO later in 2022 or the next year. This will make the company build an enviable track record, which will lead to building relations with the marquee firms.
FAQs
What does GupShup do?
GupShup, formerly called SMS Gupshup, Webaroo, is a messaging services and bot-development company operating in India, the US, and the UK providing SMS, email, Voice, USSD, and IP messaging and chatbot development to many Retail and e-commerce companies.
Who are the GupShup founders who founded Gupshup?
GupShup was founded by Beerud Sheth and Rakesh Mathur.
What companies do GupShup compete with?
GupShup’s top competitors are ServiceNow Now Platform, IBM Watson Assistant, TARS, ManyChat, Qualified, Rulai, e-bot7 and LivePerson.
Is Gupshup a unicorn?
GupShup was a unicorn, which entered the unicorn club of the Indian companies on April 18, 2021. As per various news reports, the GupShup valuation is $697 million as of July 2023.
Is Gupshup India a listed company?
The Gupshup Company is not listed but is aiming to launch an IPO soon in 2022 or 2023, and would likely list in the US market.
