BOTTY Limited Founder & CEO, Cary Gee, talks about his Conversational Commerce solution for merchants and how it leverages existing social messaging platforms to create an integrated customer engagement, analytics, payment and delivery solution.Katrina Bullock: Hello. I'm Katrina Bullock for the Finance News Network. Joining me today from BOTTY Limited is CEO and Founder Cary Gee. Cary, welcome to the network.
Cary Gee: Thank you.
Katrina Bullock: Could we start by getting you to give a bit of an introduction to the company?
Cary Gee: Well, we started BOTTY because we just felt that there's a gap in the market, and effectively, it's a Conversational Commerce platform, allowing merchants to feature their product on social messaging apps, collect payment and having the option to deliver through various on-demand services.
Katrina Bullock: So now to the solutions in a little bit more detail. Could you tell us a bit about how BOTTY software integrates with those social media platforms?
Cary Gee: We have what you call the BOTTY ecosystem partners, right. Right on the top, you have your merchants. Your merchant consists of your food and beverage and then your retail services and social as well. So we allow businesses to then feature their products and services on the messaging app, which is then Facebook Messenger, Line and Viber.
So, in order to let the business merchant transact, then you have the different payment gateways that we are integrated with. So you have the Visa CyberSource of the world, and you have Wirecard and First Data. And the local wallet will be like... for example, in the Philippines, it will be GCash and PayMaya. In Singapore it will be PayLah, and in Thailand it would be Omise. And in India it would be PayU, for example.
The last part is the delivery, right, through various on-demand services, and one of them we're integrated with is GrabExpress. So Grab is your Uber of South-East Asia. So they are providing the last-mile delivery to all the merchants.
Katrina Bullock: Conversational Commerce is becoming an increasingly common way to engage with customers. What's the size of this potential market?
Cary Gee: Talk about Facebook and Facebook Messenger alone, right. That's more than 2.3 billion users globally. We're not even touching the fact that there's also Viber and Line as well.
Katrina Bullock: Now turning to financials and the plans to list, could you tell us a bit more about that?
Cary Gee: It's all about building a good founding team as well. So I got on board Peter Rodwell. So he has been in McDonald's for 38 years, and he was the president for McDonald's in Asia. So he understands the true use of software and technology in terms of helping a restaurant run better and all that. The other founding partner that we brought on board is Andrew Reddy. So Andrew has successfully built a chain of restaurants in Asia, and sold that to a private equity firm.
Katrina Bullock: So at this stage you're pre-IPO. How much are you looking to raise pre-IPO and where will the funds go?
Cary Gee: We are looking to raise $15 million dollars from sophisticated investors. The funds will be used to onboard all the merchants that are coming through our ecosystem partners. So essentially to onboard and scale the business.
Katrina Bullock: Last question, Cary, is there anything else you'd like to add?
Cary Gee: We encourage sophisticated investors to look at our pre-IPO round. Largely because we've gone to market, we've proven our use case. Merchants love our solution. It's helping them drive commerce, engagement and loyalty. And we're looking at listing before the end of the year.
Katrina Bullock: Cary Gee, thanks for the update.
Cary Gee: Thank you for your time.
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