Six months ago Igor took part in TADSummit Podcast 96: TADSummit Innovators. Clerk Chat founded by Alexander Haque, Igor Boshoer, and Will Chertoff, raised $7M in seed funding in October 2024. They enable AI agents across messaging channels that work on behalf of their customers’ businesses for support, sales and marketing.

This was a chance to catch up on Clerk Chat’s progress and see some demos. Igor was at their engineering offsite in Montreal. Earlier today they posted on Linkedin about RCS, as Johnny referenced. In the past 6 months they’ve doubled their customer brands from 1000 to 2000.

I opened on an outstanding question from our previous conversation, which is the category definition. Which Igor explained is customer engagement, on an individual level. Clerk Chat are redefining how businesses engage with their customers, using AI agents. Across multiple channels, starting with SMS, but now expanding to RCS for the US and Canada, and WhatsApp beyond.

Igor made an important statement that RCS is the media for AI, the color TV moment for SMS. Delivering rich media, carousels, metrics, verified businesses, etc. RCS is core to Clerk Chat’s North American strategy.

Igor shared how they are working with a number of parties (my guess: Google, the carriers, and perhaps an aggregator like Infobip) to get the RCS business channel deployed. Clerk Chat makes easy for businesses, acting as a single point of registration. He positions it as paving the way,

The carriers want to avoid the mess of SMS in migrating to RCS. I personally hope they are successful, I’ve been pointing out the mess for several years. But I have my reservations based on history and some of the people involved.

Rumors of a delay until 2026 for a “full” RCS launched were put to one side by Igor. Rather ‘very soon’. I’ve been following RCS since 2007, writing about it in 2008. It’s a very different situation today than 2008. However, Google’s messaging history is the stuff of tragic comedies and I’ve been disappointed so many times that my standing advice remains: do not bet the farm on RCS, use SMS/MMS, WhatsApp, and whatever IP messaging app is popular in your country.

Igor gives a great RCS demo from 11:45 onwards of both the handset and desktops experiences. For conversational RCS the pricing has been defined and is different between the carriers. Once Clerk Chat launches, we’ll be digging into those details.

Once Johnny saw the demos his next questions were: when are you going public and how do I get shares? We’ll be tracking Clerk Chat posts for when the RCS solution is launched,

I then asked about RCS versus WhatsApp internationally. Simply, it’s what the end customer wants, that is, let the market decide. Johnny asked what % of Twilio’s revenue will Clerk Chat win?

As we wrapped up Igor stressed Clerk Chat is focused on making it easy for customer (brands and the end customers) for individualized engagement.