Wavecell, a Singaporean startup that creates APIs for communication tools, has raised a $1.6 million Series A. The round was led by Qualgro Asean Fund with participation from Wavemaker Pacific, and will be used to grow Wavecell’s market presence in Southeast Asia.
Founded in 2010, Wavecell’s products lets developers integrate SMS, voice, chat, and video calling into their applications. It currently has 500 enterprise clients and plans to expand by opening offices in Hong Kong, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Marc Magnin, Wavecell’s product and marketing director, says that the company has been profitable since it was launched and made $6 million SGD (or about $4.3 million) in revenue last year. It sought funding because “we believe that we had reached a critical size and wanted to increase our growth rate,” he tells TechCrunch.
Larger cloud communication providers include Twilio and Nexmo. Wavecell plans to differentiate by focusing on Southeast Asia instead of expanding into the U.S. and Europe, where it would have to compete with those two companies.
“We hear from them in the region, but we clearly think that we have the great advantage of being headquartered in Singapore, which gives us high visibility and exposure in Southeast Asia towards the local market and local telcos networks,” Magnin says.
He adds “we maintain an advanced knowledge of the specificities of each country in terms of communication rules, and telco specificities,” which makes it easier for Wavecell to advise clients when they tailor its APIs to their own use cases.
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