Southeast Asia has produced plenty of compelling startup stories over the past decade. Ride-hailing platforms that became super apps. eCommerce marketplaces that reshaped retail across six countries. Fintechs that brought financial services to populations that traditional banks had largely ignored. What the region has produced far fewer of are global software companies: businesses that build from Southeast Asia, sell to customers in 180 countries and attract serious capital from software-focused investors in New York.
Respond.io’s USD 62.5 million Series B shifts that conversation. The Kuala Lumpur-headquartered company, which helps mid-to-large B2C businesses manage customer conversations across WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, Line, Telegram, WeChat, voice calls and web chat, announced the round in June 2026, led by Camber Partners, a New York-based fund with USD 350 million in assets under management focused on software startups. Endeavor Catalyst, chaired by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, also participated. For a Southeast Asian software company to close a round of this size, led by a US fund investing in software specifically, is not a routine occurrence. It is worth understanding what got the company here and what it suggests about where Malaysia’s technology ecosystem is heading.
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From messaging aggregator to AI-powered revenue platform
Respond.io was founded in Hong Kong in 2017 by Gerardo Salandra, Hassan Ahmed and Iaroslav Kudritskiy. Salandra had previously worked at IBM and Google before building Runtastic, a fitness tracking app later acquired by Adidas. The founding insight was straightforward: businesses were losing customers because they could not keep up with people who had moved their conversations to messaging apps. The early product aggregated those channels into a single interface. What the company has become since then is considerably more ambitious.
Today, the platform uses AI agents to handle high volumes of customer inquiries, qualify leads and close sales without human intervention, across every major messaging channel simultaneously. Salandra told TechCrunch the company is currently processing two billion messages per quarter, a volume that creates the data flywheel he describes as the business’s core competitive moat. More messages mean better AI. Better AI attracts more customers. More customers generate more messages. The company has reached USD 35 million in annual recurring revenue, growing 169% year on year, at a 30% profit margin.
The pricing model is also worth noting because it runs counter to how most enterprise software is sold. Respond.io charges based on conversation volume rather than per seat, which means the company’s economics do not deteriorate as AI handles more of the workload. When AI replaces human agents, Respond.io’s revenue is unaffected. That structural alignment between the product’s direction and the business model is one of the cleaner stories in an AI software landscape where that alignment is often uneasy.
The Malaysia angle, honestly examined
Respond.io is not a purely homegrown Malaysian story. The company was founded in Hong Kong and relocated to Kuala Lumpur two years later, having already raised around USD 10 million before the move. That context matters and should not be glossed over.
What the Respond.io story does demonstrate, more credibly than any government report or ecosystem ranking, is that Malaysia can serve as an effective base for building and scaling a global software business. The talent is there. The operational costs make sense relative to the revenue profile. The time zone and English-language environment support serving customers across APAC, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe from a single hub. Respond.io currently generates about 30% of revenue from APAC, 30% from Latin America, 20% from the Middle East and Africa and 20% from North America and Western Europe, the latter of which is growing fastest. That is a genuinely global revenue mix, not a Southeast Asian business with a few overseas customers.
While GMV is not the same as software export capacity, it does show that Malaysia’s digital economy is maturing at the same time as more globally oriented technology companies are choosing to scale from the country. Malaysia’s digital economy surged 19% to reach US$39 billion in gross merchandise value in 2025, making it the fastest-growing digital economy in Southeast Asia, according to the e-Conomy SEA 2025 report by Google, Temasek and Bain and Company. The country also captured 32% of all private AI funding in Southeast Asia between H2 2024 and H1 2025, amounting to USD 759 million. It also led the region in IPO activity over the same period. Respond.io did not cause those numbers, but it fits the broader pattern they describe: a market that has moved beyond infrastructure build-out and is now producing commercially serious technology businesses.
Why software exports matter more than the funding headline
The funding round itself is not the most important part of this story. What matters is what Respond.io represents as a template. Southeast Asia has historically attracted capital into consumer internet, logistics and fintech because those categories had clear regional market size and visible network effects, a pattern explored in depth in why eCommerce and fintech continue to dominate SEA’s startup economy. Software companies targeting global buyers from a Southeast Asian base have been rarer and harder to fund, partly because the investors writing large cheques into B2B software have tended to focus on the US and Europe. A US fund leading a USD 62.5 million round into a Kuala Lumpur-based software company signals a broadening of that geography, even if incrementally.
The IPO question is worth raising even though Respond.io has not announced any such plans. Salandra told TechCrunch his personal ambition is to ring the bell at Nasdaq. A profitable, fast-growing software company with genuinely global revenue, generating serious investor interest from the US, is exactly the kind of business that improves the credibility of a regional IPO pipeline. Malaysia led Southeast Asia in IPO activity over the past year, but most of those listings were domestic. A software company with international revenues and a US investor base represents a different and more valuable signal for the ecosystem.
The bigger question Malaysia now has to answer
Respond.io’s round opens a question that goes beyond one company. Malaysia has spent the better part of the last decade building the infrastructure conditions for a technology ecosystem: data centre investment, 5G rollout, digital economy policy commitments and now a position as the fastest-growing digital economy in the region. The next stage is whether that foundation produces exportable software businesses at scale, companies that generate revenue from customers outside the country and can attract global capital on the strength of that revenue.
The honest answer is that one funding round, for a company that relocated to Malaysia rather than originating there, does not confirm the thesis. What it does is demonstrate that the conditions exist. It points to the talent, cost structure, infrastructure and proof point that a global software business can be built and scaled from Kuala Lumpur. Whether that becomes a pattern or remains an outlier depends on whether the ecosystem can produce more companies with genuinely international revenue, not just local traction dressed up in global language. That is the test Malaysia’s startup community now faces and Respond.io has at least made the argument that passing it is possible.