Startup Manychat provides a tool for managing and automating conversations and engagement across multiple messaging channels. Manychat’s CEO and co-founder, Mike Yan, said the company sends “billions” of messages annually on behalf of these users across TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and other chat platforms. Manychat’s trajectory mirrors both the rise of smartphone-based messaging apps over the last decade and the growing opportunity around tools that help businesses leverage that medium in a better way. Things started to take off when Facebook opened up its APIs for Messenger. Additional APIs opening up across other Meta-owned platforms as well as TikTok have boosted that growth. Users can still market on Telegram, too, Yan said, although these days that is just a small percentage of its traffic. Instagram is by far the most engaged and active platform for the company, Yan said. Manychat’s approach of building an engagement layer makes it a solid bet for the next wave of activity on messaging platforms. If you want a help desk chatbot, there are myriad tools out there, but very few that are engaging to sell or elicit other responses from users in the way that Manychat has done.