The investment arm of the Russian affiliate advertising company Admitad invested into Blinger, a Belarusian B2B startup. The service enables companies to simplify the communication between their support and sales specialists and customers using messengers. According to Evgeny Besschastnov, CEO and co-founder, the company was valued at more than $1M, and Admitad got the share at standard terms for the seed stage, but he didn’t disclose the exact numbers.
With Blinger, SMEs can optimize communication with clients through messengers by taking their requests directly into HelpDesk or CRM. For example, a client can send a message via WhatsApp, and it will be delivered to customer support in Zendesk or Salesforce. Also, the company can send the service messages trough messengers for free instead of paying SMS fees to telcom operators. Currently, Blinger supports WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and other platforms to be added soon.
The startup was launched in March 2016 by Evgeny Besschastnov and Vitali Michailiuski (CTO), who used to own an outsourcing company before. “The communication between businesses and customers via messengers is getting more and more popular”, Evgeny said to GoalEurope. “It’s a global trend, actually. I also preferred to contact companies through messengers when I needed support, so the idea of Blinger wasn’t born accidentally.”
The subscription costs from $500 to $5,000 monthly. Although the development team and the founders are from Minsk, Belarus, they mainly work for the Russian market. One of the biggest clients is OneTwoTrip, a leading CIS travel platform backed with $37M from Goldman Sachs, Atomico VC, Phenomenon Ventures and Vostok New Ventures.
There’re around 5 startups offering a similar functionality, and Evgeny said that Blinger will be targeting Western markets as well, and they are hiring account managers to support this effort. The new investor will provide access to a number of large European companies. “We will be releasing integrations to all top helpdesk and CRM systems.”
