Ex-Snap employees raise $4.3M for conversational commerce startup Whym

What is Whym, a chatty commerce startup that was founded in the past by Snap employees, is looking to facilitate shoppers to purchase online on their smartphones. Instead of filling in lengthy form forms for checkout and filling information about a card in hand, the solution offered by Whym offers an easy checkout process that allows customers can make payments using Apple Pay or Google Pay or even via text message. The company is currently announcing $4.3 million in seed capital due to its initial success with CPG as well as wellness and beauty brands.

The round was managed by Deciens Capital and included participation from DNX Ventures, Reciprocal Ventures, Unusual Ventures, Chaos Ventures and Magic Fund, as well as investments in the form of small amounts made by Sequoia, Lightspeed and Canaan Partners. Whym also has angel investment from its founders and additional executives of Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Uber, Airbnb, Red Bull and Spotify.

The company was established in 2017 by the CEO Kelly Nyland and COO Rhenee Bartlett who were both former employees of Snap. Nyland was the head of the marketing and consumer products division of Snap in which she developed the strategy to market Snap's Spectacles. Bartlett was the director of partnerships and event marketing for Spectacles. Additionally, the team's founding member and Whym's Vice President of Engineering, Ryan Hornberger was employed by Snap following the time the company bought his company Scan, Inc., which was the foundation for Snapchat's Snapcode.

While working at Snap, Nyland saw how the DM (direct messaging) screen was the main driver behind the daily use of Snapchat. She suggested that Snapchat let consumers and brands talk directly via that portion of the app.

"I realized through that journey that messaging was going to become a really important part of social shopping in the future," Nyland says.

The team at Whym realized that combining commerce and messaging to create a brand new experience in which transactions can be made via the use of text messages or even an DM thread could create an entirely new type that could be a social form of shopping. The company's first product, which was launched in June 2018, and then put in beta It offered companies a way to let buyers "reply to buy" over an SMS message.

Since then, Whym has expanded to offer companies a micro-storefront option that can be integrated with their existing marketing campaigns via text that allow customers to browse an item or a small selection of items and their variations, such as sizes or colors, for instance -- and then instantly go to. Brands can also advertise their links through messaging and social media apps, including "link in bio" solutions as well as swipe-ups (now link stickers on Instagram) as well as messaging apps, and much other.

For the consumer The solution was created to be faster and simpler than going to a standard mobile website to shop. Instead, customers are sent to the storefront's micro-storefront, where they can customize their cart. Once they're done, they can use Apple Pay or Google Pay to complete the transaction. The site also provides its original shopping experience, which allows customers to check out via text messages, but they will soon be using phone numbers to make purchases in a different way as well. From next year, users can enter their phone number to show their desire for a product they might want to purchase in the near future, as an alternative to sending the URL to a website or taking a photo similar to what they currently do.

In time, Whym will be able to provide consumers with an online shopping cart that can buy items from a variety of brands. Additionally, it will allow companies to contact their customers when they are ready to purchase.

"Up and coming direct-to-consumer brands, beauty, wellness, and CPG are our main focus," Nyland says. Nyland. "We look at businesses with the highest repurchase frequency. What Whym can offer is to rebuild all of these customers' carts one-to-1 and then create a repurchase-to-buy experience for the brands that are listed," she says. "So we can harness the power of text message on the backend to power repurchase experiences between brands and consumers automatically."

The company currently has around a hundreds of brands who use its services, and is charged a 3% plus 10C/transaction cost for each purchase. It is now growing its brand portfolio to include brands that range between $50 million to $250 million annually in GMV (gross quantity of merchandise) and is starting to offer different pricing. However, these rates haven't been announced.

Brand integrations made with Whym can take about 10 minutes, using its self-service platform. Additionally, the company has a sales staff that will demonstrate the product, help customers with how to use it, and assist in the development of their first marketing campaigns.

The company, which is comprised of a group of less than 50 people, hopes to utilize the funding to increase its reach to more brands and to further refine its product roadmap that were based on customer feedback. As of now, Whym has raised a total of $7 million in funds.