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A company called Gipshop has just raised $60 million to help bring AI into messaging for companies. Now, they're doing some interesting things that I haven't actually seen other places. But at the same time, I think their story is really interesting because this company is not new. With a lot of these companies where you see, you know, people launching these really interesting AI use cases where they're bringing AI to, I guess, businesses or things that already exist. They're. They're kind of competing with the incumbents. In this case, Git Shop is incumbent to the point where it's been around for 20 years. So after 20 years, how are they still able to raise $60 million? They're talking all about the latest IPO that they're going to do. And so a lot of people are asking, you know, like, how has this company basically not died, but also, you know, what kind of value have they added? How are they able to keep raising money? And I think the story is really interesting and could be a roadmap for many other companies. But I'll get into all of that first. I wanted to mention, if you want to try any of the AI models that I talk about on the podcast, I have a platform called AI Box AI that is currently in beta. It's got 40 different AI models on there, and essentially it allows you to chat with all of them in one place. One of my favorite features that we have added is the ability to see benchmark data from all the top AI models. So if you're using an AI model, you could see exactly how it compares with other AI models. And, um, and in addition to this, you can also see, like, directly you can test out these different models against each other. So you can ask a question and you're able to get it to regenerate the response with different AI models and see how they respond and compare them side by side. So this is a really interesting tool that I have been able to use. It also saves you a ton of money not having to have subscriptions to every single platform, one place that you could get access and test out all of the top AI models that basically you need for image, audio and text. All right, let's get into what's going on with GitHub. Oh, but I will mention for AI box, you can check that out. There's a link in the description AI box AI to try that out. All right, so GitHub, they raised $60 million. Basically what their company does is they're a kind of like a backend where you can. Where Companies can set up AI agents that interact with people via text message. So they, it's not necessarily like a competitor to WhatsApp, I would say, or something like that because they actually integrate with WhatsApp and a bunch of other players. So they have a couple interesting things. They have a WhatsApp messaging API. So you could basically leverage WhatsApp if your customers are already on there. Now this is much bigger in other comp. In other countries than America. Um, they have noted one of the biggest industry or biggest countries is actually India. So the, the problem with America is a lot of people I think are, you know, on their iPhones with their blue bubble text message on imessage. Most of the world other than America is on WhatsApp and they actually interact with businesses. I remember taking a trip to Brazil a number of years ago and basically every business there had like their WhatsApp that, that's how you contact them if you have customer support requests, if you want schedule something like you just, they have their WhatsApp number and that's basically how everyone communicates there. And the nice thing about that is for countries where, you know, carrier fees can be expensive, SMS can be expensive. It's all over Internet. So if you have access to WI fi, you can get this rich data. You can send images and questions and stuff and integrate with a lot of cool tools like GitHub. So basically what they've done is they've been building tools that essentially allow customers and companies to talk. That's, that's what they've been doing. They've been doing that for 20 years. And they, I think they were a lot more relevant in their first offering when they were basically like a WhatsApp competitor. They're like, look, skip out on paying for SMS, use this. And so they didn't really gain all of the, like, they didn't grow as fast as WhatsApp did. So they have definitely had to pivot. They've been around for 20 years, they've done a lot of pivots. And the latest thing is basically that you're able to now deploy AI agents in text or voice mode. What I think is interesting is they actually raise pivot at a billion dollar over a billion dollar valuation back in 2021. And so they got a lot of kind of like news coverage for this. This was, yeah, a $1.4 billion round of funding that they did 2021, which of course is when all startups had these sky high valuations. And so it's really difficult for any company that raised during that period afterwards to have kept up with the valuation, right? Money was really easy. These valuations were very high and you had to have serious business growth after the fact in order to maintain these valuations. So they haven't actually said what their new valuation is on this round. There's like, oh, it wasn't a price round, like. And then basically what I'm reading from it is they raised, you know, they raised I think $340 million, which is huge, a billion dollar, over $1 billion valuation. And shortly after that, Fidelity, which actually led that round, they slash their internal valuation on the startup at least three times between 2023 and 2024. So they actually brought it as low as $486 million. So they literally raised 340 million. And Fidelity, the lead investor on that round, said actually they're only worth 486 million total. So basically, and this is also, I think pretty. This is basically overseen as well. With this latest round, they've just raised $60 million. Um, but that's. They said about half of that is equity and half of that is debt. So they probably raised like $30 million and then $30 million worth of debt. So you are not getting the amount of money you used to get in 2021. And I think a lot of companies are going to be in this exact same position. But honestly, kudos to them for continuing to raise and continue to push the product forward. They've added AI and so this seems like it's the new kind of sphere, the new level that they need to be able to go and raise more money and keep the company going. Now essentially what's interesting here with AI, I think they basically said, you know, it, you can't just plug an AI model straight out of, you know, Chat GPT and just basically have your customers talk to Chat GPT about your company. Like, that's not going to work. You need to do a bunch of custom things, right? You got to like, give it data about your company, you got to tell it how to respond and how to behave. And there's a whole bunch of things you got to do. And there's different companies that are doing this, but this is one of the areas that they're essentially tackling. So if, if a company were to send you a message on WhatsApp, you tie into their backend and train the agent and you deploy an agent to respond to them and talk to them. So this is what they specifically said about it. This is their CEO Seth. He said there's A lot of demand coming from enterprise. Everybody needs to build these AI agents which work through messaging like RCS and WhatsApp or through voice. So building on these agents there's a huge demand and we need to support it. It's interesting because voice is one of the big things they highlight on their website and it's actually not that crazy. Like if you figured out the AI agent for text, you can go grab an API to 11 labs or a number of other and offer the voice element as well. And so this is kind of cool that they're building this out globally. Obviously AI agents are getting really popular. Basically every major company is working on them. What I would say is get Shop essentially has said they don't think this is a big threat to them. Their CEO pretty much pointed out that they have 50,000 customers across more than 100 companies countries. And I mean 50,000, honestly when I heard that didn't actually sound like a huge number for company those formerly valued at a billion dollars. But these are businesses, right? 50,000 businesses. It's not just users. Probably way more users messaging them. In fact they, I think they have said that on their website they share exactly how many, you know, a lot of their key analytics. So 45,000 customers, 60 plus countries served. This is on their website. So I was reading a TechCrunch article, maybe they quote them higher there or maybe it's misquoted. But in any case they said they have 120 billion plus conversations per year that companies are having or that customers are having with the company. So you know, maybe 45, 50,000 customers and then 1.2 billion conversations or messages. So I guess you could send like 20 messages in a conversation, so whittle that down a bit. But messages that are being sent by customers, which I think is, which is kind of interesting and actually I think the 120 billion was specifically conversations. So I'm going that 120 billion conversations largely led out of India. I think that's the biggest geographic area that they're targeting. So this is what they said. They said businesses cannot simply use foundation models off the shelf and just put them in front of customers. They need a lot of customization to be done and that's where Gap Shop comes in. That's what we provide. They have said though, right? So like I'll give them a lot of crap for raising a lot of money and then raising less money. Honestly, no shade. I think they're doing a great job trying to push their company forward and obviously hasn't scaled perhaps the way they'd hoped. But they did say that since their last round they have tripled the revenue and they grew it profitably. They weren't really clear on if they had an increased valuation, and not clear basically means no, they did not have an increased valuation, obviously much decreased valuation. One thing that I do think is interesting was when asked about this was how they responded. So Set said as a founder, you focus on value and the valuation will follow. When he was asked whether he would still continue the startup, a quote unquote unicorn, he says, we operate ourselves like we're going to be a big company. So all of this is very interesting. They're obviously growing quickly. I'll be super curious to see how they continue in the future if this is, you know, sustainable. They said that they're focusing on a big ipo, which will be very interesting to keep up with. I will keep you up to date on all of that. In any case, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today. If you enjoyed it, make sure to leave us a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. And as always, make sure you go check out AI box AI if you'd like to access the top 40 AI models, all for one price, 20 bucks a month on one platform. Thank you so much for tuning in and I will catch you next time.