We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures Fund II has completed an investment in CometChat. CometChat enables businesses and developers to quickly add voice, video, and text chat to their web apps, mobile apps, and websites using powerful SDKs/APIs and no/low code tools.

Background: 

Even before Covid-19, virtual communication was growing rapidly, and after, it exploded. From connecting a patient with their doctor on a medical site to helping users plan a coffee date on a dating app, voice, video, and text chat interfaces are quickly becoming the norm within apps as well as an expectation from consumers. It is clear that the future of human interactions is going to be increasingly virtual and remote, and anyone building anything today needs their users to feel connected to keep them engaged and to retain them. 

However, embedding a real-time communication layer (RTC) into a website or application comes with its own challenges. Building a messaging solution in an app is like building two separate applications - one is the actual product and the second is the messaging app within the app. Whether it's voice, video, or text, it is extremely difficult to create and update these chat interfaces. Developers, who should be focusing on the core elements of their product, find themselves spending weeks just building out a basic text based chat, and orders of magnitude more time to add voice and video. Not to mention things like moderation, typing indicators, and other features that are now table stakes. While there are third-party options available, businesses want users to stay in their apps to increase engagement and do not want to risk sending their customers through an additional platform. With the drastic rise of communication-based features within the diverse landscape of digital applications, developers are looking for an easy-to-use virtual communication solution that will quickly add these features so they can go back to focusing on their end product.

Company Specifics: 

CometChat provides a developer-centric, low/no code as well as ‘drag and drop’ solutions that enables in-app messaging within minutes. Developers can save months worth of development and have voice, video, and text functionality in their application basically overnight, and with industry grade robustness and a world class messaging experience with all the bells and whistles. Being a cloud-based service, CometChat is always available, continuously upgraded, and auto-scales to meet developers’ needs. The CometChat platform enables developers to add additional features such as adding HIPAA or Soc2 compliant messaging to extend usability through their extensions marketplace, so developers can curate their product according to their needs. 

The twin brother founders, Anant Garg and Anuj Garg are uniquely suited to capitalize on this opportunity. Over ten years ago they started building chat solutions with their prior product, which sold similar features but through individual licensing. In the last year, they shifted to a subscription, software as a service model. We met the team when they went through the Techstars Boulder 2019 program and have been closely watching their progress. Seeing that COVID has added to the acceleration of demand for what was already a really hot product market in space, we are excited to work with them as they grow.