Sunny Manivannan Chief Executive Officer, Manychat

Company

Founded by Mike Yan in 2015, Manychat is a Chat Marketing platform that helps almost 2 million businesses across 190 countries engage and support billions of their customers in real-time and at scale, supporting all of the critical consumer communication channels.

Powering 8.5 million active conversations per day on Facebook Messenger, Manychat is the Chat Marketing platform that supports Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, email and SMS. Brands choose Manychat over competitors because it is user-friendly (its drag-and-drop feature means no coding is required), supports numerous channels, and because of its ability to help customers scale their Chat Marketing initiatives. Manychat also has a supportive community of 100k+ on Facebook for Chat Marketing professionals. Its integrations and features make it easy for brands to reach large audiences quickly. To date, users have generated 101M+ contacts via click-to-Messenger ads. Using Manychat features that make it easy for consumers to start a conversation with a business, like a QR code that opens a Messenger conversation, brands have started conversations with over 41M contacts.

Search Background

Having raised an $18m Series A funding round in 2019 led by Bessemer Ventures, Manychat which has been profitable since inception, had almost all of this capital still undeployed at the time of the search. Having weathered the complexities the Covid crisis presented, the company emerged with a great opportunity to invest into new product areas in order to accelerate growth. Founder and CEO, Mike Yan took the considered decision to step back from his role as CEO and to bring in a placement who could steer it through it’s next phase of growth.

With the massive potential in both the markets that Manychat operated in but also in potentially growing into new markets, the incoming CEO would determine the direction and trajectory for Manychat, determining how Manychat would grow from $20 million ARR to a $100 million business and beyond. As this was an undefined category where Manychat was leading the way, the CEO would need to be able to carve out a path for the company and determine what the future holds for the business.

Requirements

Working with Mike, the incoming CEO would be responsible for leading and scaling the current business into an international market leader. They would need to be able to lead a global organisation of over 150 people located across offices in San Francisco, New York, Barcelona and Yerevan. They would also need to bring an understanding of the PLG & SMB SaaS, experience in MarTech and a strong mind for taking deploying capital successfully into new growth areas. In doing so the CEO would need to work with the board to analyse Manychat’s position and plans and build a company strategy that matches the market opportunity that Manychat had in front of it. This would encompass new market opportunities, product innovations and building scalable process’ and structures. The CEO could be based in any location from the US to Eastern Europe, but the preference was either on the East Coast or Western Europe.

Result

From a shortlist that included options across Europe and the US, Sunny Manivannan proved to be an ideal fit for the company. Sunny was SVP and General Manager for Global SMB at the MarTech, Braze. During a career that stretched across Braze, Guru, Coupa Software, Zenpurchase and McKinsey as well having worked in multiple functions including General Management, Product Marketing and Operations as well as having been a Co-Founder himself, Sunny brought a wealth of experience to the table as well as the hunger to take on his first CEO position.