:quality(75)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/bloomberglinea/W6KS3PUMUFEXLMJKZVP2ULS5CA.JPG "Nicolás Durán, co-founder and CEO of Cotalker, at their offices in Wynwood, Miami.")
Miami — Cotalker, a Chilean workflow management tool, today announced the close of a $3.2 million Seed round. The company makes it easier for employees, especially field workers, to communicate and complete processes through an app.
“When we started, we noticed that everything was via WhatsApp, but WhatsApp isn’t made for processes, it’s made for communication. But then all the information was stored on the employee’s phone, which doesn’t work for the company,” said Nicolás Durán, the company’s co-founder and CEO.
Cotalker goes after industries it considers “dinosaurs,” such as gas stations, ports, mechanics, real estate, and banking, to name a few.
“Normally when we start with a company, we start with one use case, but as they start seeing the value, they request other use cases and they start integrating everything into one platform,” Durán said. Cotalker currently offers digitalization of between 1-4 workflows. “So a customer may start with a 1x value but end up with a 4x value,” said Durán.
The company makes money by charging a subscription fee for each individual team member that uses the software, and it’s a three-tiered approach depending on what bells and whistles a customer wants.
Cotalker currently has 28 employees and about 30,000 individual users.
The company, which launched in Chile in 2016, recently relocated its headquarters to Miami with plans to continue expanding in the LatAm market as well as enter the U.S. market, which is what the money from this raise will be used for. Durán said that he thinks the U.S. market is more ready for their product.
The round was led by Genesis Ventures - which we wrote about earlier this year - with participation from Weboost, the Amarena family office, and Indeed Ventures.
“North American companies are more process oriented. In LatAm, companies are not process centered; they want to digitize, but they haven’t even figured out the process yet, so it makes the sales cycle longer, because we have to figure out the process before we can digitize it,” he added.
The company now experiences a 3-month sales cycle with “no churn,” Durán added and has experienced a 100% year over year growth rate in 2020. In Chile, the company says they control 80% of the gas station market, and their clients include Copec and Petrobras.
The Backstory
Durán is a serial entrepreneur and previously owned and ran a dev shop in Chile with his now co-founder, Hans Buckel. He noticed two things: 1) People did everything via WhatsApp 2) As a person who has difficulty concentrating, he needed everything to be very structured and process oriented. These two insights gave him the idea for Cotalker. He and Buckel, along with another friend, Edward Alvarado, who ran a separate dev shop, joined forces to start the company.
