Denver-based CometChat, a startup building plug and play communication products, raised $1.6 million in seed financing from Colorado’s Range Ventures, New York’s Silicon Badia and Delaware-based iSeed Ventures.
CometChat, which was incorporated in the U.S. in 2019 by twin brothers Anuj Garg and Anant Garg, works with companies to provide communication products to improve brands’ user engagement.
The company designs functions like chat, video and live event capabilities within websites and apps to help enterprises that are looking to boost user engagement and accelerate their go to market time.
The solution is not a live customer support chat, rather, a communication tool for marketplaces, dating apps or communities that want their users to interact with each other.
The company was bootstrapped until last year and took part in the Techstars Boulder Accelerator Program in 2019.
Anuj said the company has always been measured in how and when it raises capital, only bringing on what it needed, at the time it was necessary.
As business started to pick up and CometChat’s product was increasingly being relied on by customers, he knew now was the time to bring on a jolt of cash.
“As we started seeing immense growth using our solution, I think we realized we are on to something and this is growing faster than what we can do,” he said. “I always believed that we should be raising rational capital, where we have a purpose for it and we can actually spend it.”
Business picked up to the point where the company was receiving inbound requests from customers that it was unable to fulfill due to the size of its staff.
To meet that need, the funds raised in this seed round will be used to scale up sales and marketing functions at CometChat.
“Right now, it’s about making sure we can take care all of this incoming demand,” Anuj said.
The company has built its nearly 50-person engineering team in Mumbai and has three staff members in Denver. Anuj said CometChat hopes to grow that local staff to seven within the month.
In addition, the capital will help CometChat enter new markets with its developer-first marketing approach and make significant investments in product development.
“Integrated collaboration and chat is a mission-critical part of every app in the post-COVID economy, as evidenced by the tremendous organic demand for CometChat’s platform,” said Adam Burrows, co-founder of Range Ventures. “We are impressed by CometChat’s developer-friendly product and are excited to be invested in another exceptional Denver-based company.”
