US-based and India-born conversational messaging platform Gupshup on Wednesday announced the appointment of Gaurav Kachhawa as its chief product officer.
He has worked at Twitter, Electronic Arts, Adobe Inc, and Zynga. Recently, he was senior director of product management with the creative cloud group at Adobe.
“I am thrilled to be returning to Gupshup and help drive its next phase of growth and impact,” Kachhawa said.
Gupshup said it is planning to set up a Conversational AI Innovation lab in Silicon Valley, to tap into the global talent pool and build partnerships with industry players.
This week, Gupshup acquired Dotgo, a New Jersey-based rich communications services (RCS) startup. The acquisition comes at a time when Gupshup is planning an initial public offering (IPO) in the US next July.
In July this year, it secured $240 million in its Series F round of funding.
Founded in 2004 as Webaroo Inc by Beerud Sheth and Rakesh Mathur, Gupshup started out as an offline search engine. It later pivoted to an SMS-based B2C social network which did not bring in much revenue.
The company then moved to a B2B model to provide customer engagement across SMS and other channels. Gupshup has now gone on to include hyperlinks to SMS and added OTT (over the top) messaging channels, such as WhatsApp for Business, RCS, and the Gupshup IP messaging channel, to its platform.
The firm offers services such as messaging APIs (application programming interfaces), bot platforms, bot building tools, scripting engine, omnichannel inbox, conversational AI (artificial intelligence), and client-side software. Its carrier-grade platform provides messaging APIs across more than 30 channels.
