Respond.io, a social and conversational commerce platform founded in 2017 by Salvadoran Gerardo Salandra, recently announced an expansion process into Latin America after having closed a series A financing for $7 million as a result of its success in South Asia.

In the words of Salandra, her company, based in Malaysia, “allows companies to do business through messaging, sales, marketing, and support systems”, that is, through software, communication between clients and companies is unified .

“The latest wave of innovation in digital commerce was started by small brands using Instagram. Our platform uses social commerce to drive shoppers to tailor-made social accounts and enables consumers to accelerate their purchase decisions through WhatsApp and other messengers,” he noted.

Currently, more than 10,000 companies from 86 countries use its services, but the vision with the new injection of capital is to set up offices in El Salvador, Mexico, and Colombia, as well as evaluate its entry into the Middle East and Europe.

“The way we have grown is through sales with distributors. We have 56 “partners” in Latin America. So, our intention for the next year is basically to grow with those partners and buy some of them,” the businessman explained to “Diario El Salvador.”

The main project of Salandra and its founding partners, Hassan Ahmed and Iaroslav Kudritskiy, is to acquire the operations of one of its service distributors in El Salvador, and in this way, increase its presence in the business ecosystem of the territory.

“We will buy one of the partner companies in El Salvador, which has a technical team of 100 people and is ready to grow, and its only limits are resources. In addition, this investment that we are going to make in the country is going to contribute to continuing developing the ecosystem of programmers in El Salvador », he indicated.

By carrying out this operation, it is expected to hire more personnel and transform El Salvador into its “hub” for Central America.

A company perspective on El Salvador

El Salvador stands out with an accelerated business movement on digital platforms, says Salandra, citing the data it receives monthly on the use of its services in the country.

“El Salvador is a strong economy with strong trade. The number of messages that are processed in the country is quite large. We work in Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua and we don’t see anything like what happens in El Salvador,” said the businessman.

“The way we have grown is through sales with distributors, we have 56 “partners” in Latin America. So our intention for next year is basically to grow with those partners and buy some of them.” Gerardo Salandra, founder of Respond.io