Wassist has raised USD $1.1 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Playfair. The London startup will use the money to support growth and product development.
The round also included Paul Forster, Charlie Songhurst, Barney Hussey-Yeo, and angel investors from Balderton Capital and Dawn Capital. Wassist says businesses can launch an AI agent on WhatsApp without engineers or changes to a store's theme code.
The company focuses on online retail, selling software that connects brands' websites to WhatsApp conversations. Customers can ask product questions, receive order updates and recommendations, and complete purchases within the same thread, with checkout displayed in-app through the retailer's website.
Its software is designed to reduce the technical work typically involved in using the WhatsApp Business API, including message templates, webhooks, media handling, and routing. It also includes pre-set functions for cart recovery, order updates, and product recommendations, and works with tools such as Yotpo, Klaviyo, and Recharge in the Shopify ecosystem.
The business was founded by Josh Warwick, who built the core product over 10 months during weekend hackathons. The company says the product reached more than 2,000 end-user conversations in that period and has since grown to 80,000 without paid marketing.
Wassist recently made its first hire and was selected for Balderton's Launched Programme. It is based in London and was founded in 2025.
Why WhatsApp
Wassist is betting that WhatsApp will become a more important sales and service channel for smaller businesses, particularly in Europe and the US. It says recent changes in large language models, the WhatsApp Business API, and messaging economics have made conversational commerce more practical for companies without large customer service teams.
According to the company, Meta expanded its Business API in 2022, and the cost of outbound messaging fell to zero in late 2024. Wassist argues those changes have altered the economics of proactive customer contact on WhatsApp for small businesses.
The startup also highlights the contrast with email and conventional digital marketing channels. Citing Meta consumer data, it says WhatsApp message open rates are 98 per cent, compared with around 20 per cent for email, and that click-through rates on WhatsApp are typically much higher.
By Wassist's own figures, cart recovery through WhatsApp has been four times more effective than email. The company also argues that brands using AI tools on third-party consumer platforms may lose visibility into what customers are asking, while direct messaging gives merchants access to those interactions.
Warwick founded the company after studying computer science at Oxford and working as Technical Lead at Theodo, where he built products for larger companies and startups including Admiral and Cleo. He later joined property technology startup Ark as Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer.
He said the company was built to help brands control customer conversations on a platform people already use every day. "WhatsApp is about to become the default commerce channel for businesses. That is already the default 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," said Josh Warwick, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Wassist.
Early customers
Among the startup's customers is Hollywood Browzer, which uses the product to answer shoppers' questions about its beauty products. Wassist says the tool helps brands turn customer enquiries that might otherwise stall a purchase into sales.
"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," said Alice Murphy, Head of Marketing, Hollywood Browzer.
Another customer, Round Treasury, said the software had significantly reduced setup time. "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," said Hayyaan Ahmad, Co-Founder, Round Treasury.
Playfair sees a gap in the market for smaller businesses that want to use WhatsApp as a direct sales and service channel. "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," said Lucia Polverino, Investor, Playfair.