Hassan Ahmed Respond.io co-founder story is one every Pakistani tech enthusiast should know. A Peshawar native who built his career thousands of kilometres from home, Hassan Ahmed has helped take a global AI messaging company to one of Southeast Asia’s biggest SaaS funding rounds of the year. Respond.io closed a $62.5 million Series B in June 2026, a milestone that puts a Pakistani engineer at the heart of a world-class tech success story.
What Is Respond.io?
In 2017, Hassan Ahmed (CTO), Gerardo Salandra (CEO), and Iaroslav Kudritskiy (COO) co-founded the company. It started as an AI chatbot startup called Rocketbots in Hong Kong, then moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and changed its name to Respond.io in 2019 to focus on omnichannel customer conversations.
Respond.io offers a centralised AI customer communication platform that lets businesses manage customer interactions across multiple messaging channels. The platform connects WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, TikTok, WeChat, and web chat, so companies can handle everything from one dashboard.
The platform now processes 2 billion messages per quarter for over 10,000 businesses across more than 180 countries. Clients include names like Toyota, British Airways, and Decathlon.
The $62.5M Series B: What Happened
Respond.io raised $62.5 million in a Series B, led by Camber Partners with participation from Endeavor Catalyst and existing investors. Since its $7 million Series A in 2022, the company has expanded into voice calling, deeper channel integrations, and AI Agents.
The numbers that convinced investors are hard to argue with. The company has grown to $35 million in annual recurring revenue, growing 169% year-over-year, at a 30% profit margin. Unlike many venture-backed software startups, Respond.io entered this funding round from a position of profitability.
Camber Partners is a New York City-based growth equity firm whose selective portfolio includes Dropbox, PandaDoc, and Pipedrive, while Endeavor Catalyst is chaired by Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Inflection AI.
After building a strong portfolio of customers in APAC, LATAM, and EMEA, the company is using this funding to accelerate local acquisitions and build a stronger regional presence in North America and Europe.
Hassan Ahmed: From Peshawar to the Global Tech Stage
Ahmed is a Peshawar native and alumnus of the University of Peshawar, and serves as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of the venture. On his personal website, he describes himself as a proud Pashtun hailing from Pakistan, who has been building things for the web for the past 15 years.
Hassan Ahmed has played an important role in shaping the company’s product direction and engineering strength. His involvement reflects the increasing presence of Pakistani talent in global SaaS and AI-driven startups, particularly in leadership roles across distributed tech teams.
As CTO, Ahmed leads the technical side of a platform that has to handle billions of messages across dozens of different messaging channels without breaking. That is not a small engineering challenge. Building that infrastructure reliably, at scale, and profitably, is exactly what attracted top-tier investors from New York.
Why This Matters for Pakistani Founders
The story of Hassan Ahmed Respond.io carries a clear message for founders back home. A Pakistani engineer, working outside Pakistan, has co-built a globally scaled, profitable SaaS product that just raised more money in a single round than many entire national startup ecosystems see in a year.
Pakistan’s domestic tech ecosystem remains far below its peak funding heights of $347 million and $331 million achieved in 2021 and 2022 respectively. That gap is real. But Ahmed’s path also shows that the talent clearly exists. The question is where and how it finds the right opportunity.
In 2017, Respond.io set out to solve a simple problem: businesses could not keep up with customers who had moved to messaging apps. Today, with its customer conversation management software, it has become one of the tech success stories of Malaysia.
The platform’s success also has direct relevance for Pakistani businesses. WhatsApp is one of the most used apps in Pakistan, and local businesses of all sizes rely on messaging to talk to customers. Platforms like Respond.io are built exactly for that reality. The company describes its core customers as ‘high-consideration’ businesses, where customers need to talk to someone before buying, such as healthcare, automotive, retail, education, and travel. As the CEO put it, ‘You don’t go to a website, put your credit card, and buy a car; you chat with someone, you ask a lot of questions.’
What the AI Angle Means
Unlike enterprise software competitors that charge per seat, Respond charges based on the volume of customer conversations, meaning it does not matter whether a human or an AI is answering. This is a smart model in a world where AI agents are taking over parts of customer support.
More messages mean better AI. Better AI attracts more customers. More customers generate more messages. The CEO calls this the data flywheel, and it is one reason investors backed the company so strongly. A Pakistani engineer helped build that flywheel from the ground up.
You can learn more about Respond.io’s platform and its AI agent capabilities on the company’s official website. For context on how Pakistan’s tech landscape is evolving, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) publishes regular updates on the country’s digital economy progress.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Hassan Ahmed?
Hassan is the CTO and co-founder of Respond.io. He is based in Kuala Lumpur and describes himself as a proud Pashtun hailing from Pakistan. He studied at the University of Peshawar before building his career in the global tech industry.
What does Respond.io actually do?
It unifies WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, LINE, Telegram, WeChat, voice calls, email, web chat, and 16 more integrations into a single platform with AI agents, automation, and CRM tools. Businesses use it to manage all customer conversations from one place.
Who led the $62.5M Series B round?
The funding was led by Camber Partners, a New York City-based growth equity firm that invests in only a handful of capital-efficient software businesses per year, with a pre-fund portfolio that includes Dropbox, PandaDoc, and Pipedrive.
Where will the new funding go?
Respond.io plans to use the funding for hiring, organic growth, and strategic acquisitions in North America and Europe. The CEO confirmed the company is already in talks with a couple of potential acquisition targets.