Wassist, a no-code WhatsApp commerce startup, has raised £825,000 in a pre-seed round led by Playfair. Participating investors include Paul Forster, exited founder of Indeed; Charlie Songhurst, Meta board member; Barney Hussey-Yeo, Founder and CEO of Cleo; and angels from Balderton Capital and Dawn Capital. The funding will be used to accelerate growth and product development.
Building on the WhatsApp Business API is normally a multi-month engineering project. There is a 24-hour message window to respect, templates to get approved, webhooks to configure, media handling, typing indicators, routing, and more. Wassist compresses all of that into a single workflow. A brand types its store URL and gets a working AI ambassador in minutes, with no engineering team and no edits to the store's theme code. A shopper clicks the WhatsApp logo on a brand's mobile site and is met by the brand's AI ambassador - an agent trained in the brand's voice that answers product questions, handles order updates, and recommends items based on past conversations. Where most WhatsApp commerce products route the customer back to a website to pay, Wassist completes the purchase in the thread. The shopper can add to cart and payment happens through the website checkout, all shown in-app, with receipts and shipping updates arriving in the same conversation. The product is pre-configured for e-commerce, with cart recovery, order updates, and product recommendations built in. It works alongside Yotpo, Klaviyo, Recharge, and the rest of the Shopify stack.
Most brands today reach customers through one-way channels such as email, ads, and broadcast notifications. Email open rates sit at around 20 per cent. WhatsApp messages open at 98 per cent, according to Meta's latest consumer report. Click-through rates run 20 to 60 per cent on WhatsApp versus 1 to 2 per cent on email. Cart recovery, in Wassist's data, is 4x more effective than email. When customers ask AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Google's Gemini about a product, the conversation belongs to OpenAI or Google, and the brand never sees what was asked. With Wassist, the brand sees the conversation, learns what customers actually want, and can build a direct one-to-one relationship in a channel three billion people open.
WhatsApp expanded its Business API in 2022. In November 2024, Meta cut the cost of outbound messaging to zero, making proactive customer engagement on WhatsApp economically viable for a small business for the first time. In countries such as India and Brazil, WhatsApp is already the default channel for small business commerce. In Europe and the United States, the consumer base is there but the business tooling is not.
Wassist was started solo by founder and CEO Josh Warwick, who created the core of the product at weekend hackathons over a 10-month period. In that time, it reached more than 2,000 end-user conversations, now at 80,000, with no paid marketing. Customers include Hollywood Browzer, a beauty brand that uses Wassist to help shoppers navigate technical questions around its products, turning FAQ traffic that would once have stalled a sale into completed purchases.
WhatsApp is about to become the default commerce channel for businesses. That is the default already in Brazil, India and Mexico, and the only reason it hadn't landed in Europe and the US is that previously conversations couldn't scale without huge customer service teams. LLMs have changed that. OpenAI wants those commerce conversations to happen in ChatGPT, and Google wants them in Search, but two billion people already open WhatsApp every day to talk to people they trust. We built Wassist so every brand can own those conversations in the channel customers actually use, in minutes rather than months, without handing them to a Big Tech intermediary.
No one has built a truly agentic WhatsApp layer for small businesses. The recent changes to the WhatsApp Business API, the models, and the economics have only just aligned. Three billion people are already on the platform, and in markets like India and Brazil it is already how the majority of small businesses sell and engage with their customers. We believe that Europe and the US will follow fast. The combination of the world's most trusted messaging platform and genuinely intelligent conversation, applied to commerce, is a true step change.
We're really happy to be working with Wassist to better serve our existing customers and help new customers find the products they need. It's been a great experience working with the team to date, as they've been super proactive in helping us better utilise WhatsApp for our business.
Wassist compressed days of setup into hours, handling everything from linking our WhatsApp Business account to managing the API and creating our agents. Changes that used to take days were shipped in under 30 minutes, and the team moves fast enough that it felt more like a collaboration than a vendor relationship. As founders, we see WhatsApp as no longer optional for business, and Wassist's MCP compatibility means any brand can plug in and offer it as a live interface to their AI tools.
