While you might have thought that Slack won the day and now owns the chat market, new incumbents are coming in hot and finding ways to continue to innovate. One of the companies that it’s safe to say is on a rocket-like trajectory is Rocket.chat which announced a whopping $19M Series A Round today.
Rocket’s latest round was led by Valor Capital Group and includes a number of high profile investors like NEA, Greycroft and more. The funding comes off of what sounds like a strong year of growth in 2020.
Rocket.Chat is not disclosing its valuation with this round, but it indeed comes on the back of some significant growth in the last year. The startup now has 16 million registered users across 150 countries, with eight million of them monthly active users. Of that 16 million, 11.3 million users registered for the service in the past six months. It’s currently installed on some 845,000 servers, the company said, and has over 1,500 developers building on its platform.(Source – Techcrunch)
Prior to this round Rocket.chat had raised $7.9M so this brings their total funding to $26.9M. I think there’s also a good chance (unless you know of someone else) that Rocket.chat now takes the cake for raising the most money while branding on a .CHAT domain name. While the company does own RocketChat.com they are forwarding it to Rocket.chat which it looks like they’re going to stick with as their primary domain.
Over the last few years we’ve seen hot startups and big name VCs become a lot more comfortable with non .COMs with extensions like .IO and .AI taking off in the ccTLD space and extensions like .finance, .tech, and more gaining steam in the new gTLD space.
Congrats to the whole Rocket.chat team, it’s pretty clear that 2021 is going to be an exciting year! 🚀
