TextYess, the Italian start-up that helps e-commerce businesses increase sales through WhatsApp and artificial intelligence, announces the closure of a €2.4 million seed round.
The transaction was led by two specialised investors: VC Partners, an Italian fund launched by Stefano Siglienti, Roberta Vercellotti and Alberto Grignolo, the latter of whom was one of the managers who contributed to YNAP’s rise from €0 to €5 billion in exit value, and Entourage, a Belgian fund specialising in B2B SaaS, founded by Pieterjan Bouten, former founder of Showpad, which he grew to €100 million in ARR.
The round also saw the participation of German fund Angel Invest Ventures and a pool of internationally renowned business angels active in the Italian start-up scene, including Filippo Conforti (CEO Commerce Layer), David Clarke (former CTO Workday), Gianluca Cocco (founder Qomodo), Mattia Montepara (CEO Sibill), Michele Attisani (founder FaceIT), Federico Sargenti (former CEO Everli), Luca Rodella (CEO Smartpricing), Paolo Fois (CEO Lexroom), Marco Castello (general manager Bending Spoons) and Gabriele Tagliavia (COO Talixo).
The funds raised will be used primarily to accelerate new customer acquisition, enhance its suite of AI Agents—intelligent digital assistants that autonomously manage conversations and repetitive tasks, helping brands save time and offer a more personalised service to customers—and support international expansion.
The Italian e-commerce market continues to grow, with consumer sales exceeding €45 billion (+14%) in 2023, but less than 15% of companies actually manage to profit from online sales, the start-up reports in a statement. The main cause is the progressive saturation of traditional communication channels used to manage customer retention: online advertising costs are constantly increasing, while email marketing is losing effectiveness due to the information overload affecting consumers.
” The conversion rate of a text message on WhatsApp is three times higher than that of an email marketing campaign,” explains Riccardo Russo, co-founder and CEO of TextYess (pictured with co-founder Edvaldo Gjonikaj), in the press release. “That’s why we chose to leverage the potential of an immediate communication channel with a high rate of engagement with the end customer, such as WhatsApp, transforming it into a direct sales tool.”
TextYess, which had already raised €450,000 in May 2023, has developed artificial intelligence-based software that allows brands to send personalised WhatsApp messages to individual customers automatically. The platform integrates with the entire technology stack of an e-commerce site, acquiring detailed behavioural data on customers, from products purchased to pages visited, to automatically generate specific messages for each individual customer.
The ROI, or return on investment, for the brand is significant: an average of £30 in revenue for every £1 invested in the platform. To date, the main use cases offered by the platform relate to AI-powered broadcast campaigns: promotional messages sent to the entire customer base but hyper-personalised, where each customer receives a different text based on their purchase history. Advanced automation: automated flows to recover abandoned carts, reactivate inactive customers or launch products to specific segments; 24/7 AI Shopping Assistant: a virtual assistant that is always active, answering customer questions, managing orders and providing support, updated in real time on the entire product catalogue.
The product was launched in January 2024 by Riccardo Russo (former growth manager at Blink, accelerated by Y Combinator) and Edvaldo Gjonikaj (former senior software engineer at Growishpay). Shortly after the launch, Ilaria Carofiglio (formerly of Charles) and Pietro di Chio (formerly of Scalapay), members of the founding team of TextYess, joined the team. The company has achieved significant milestones in less than two years: over 160 brands use the platform daily, particularly in the fashion, beauty, food and pet food sectors.
The company exceeded €1 million in annual recurring revenue in August 2025, demonstrating the strength of its business model and the growing demand for advanced conversational commerce solutions. TextYess’ long-term vision goes beyond conversational commerce: “We are building a suite of AI agents that will allow brands to manage their e-commerce stores on autopilot,” says Russo. “Most e-commerce businesses today are extremely manual, often with understaffed teams. We want to enable these brands to perform better and better, making them more efficient and enhancing the work of their internal teams.”
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