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Gupshup, a business messaging startup that began its journey in India over two decades ago and became a unicorn four years ago, has raised a new over $60 million round — but is keeping its new valuation under wraps.

In 2021, Gupshup raised two funding rounds within four months, securing $340 million from prominent investors including Tiger Global, Fidelity Management, Think Investments, and Malabar Investments. These rounds — the startup’s first in roughly a decade — valued Gupshup at $1.4 billion. However, Fidelity, which led the round following its unicorn milestone, slashed its internal valuation of the startup at least three times between 2023 and 2024, bringing it down to as low as $486 million.

The new funding round, which combines equity and debt financing from Globespan Capital Partners and EvolutionX Debt Capital, aims to help the San Francisco-headquartered startup expand its presence across its high-growth markets, including India, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa.

The startup would not reveal the exact debt portion although its founder and CEO Beerud Seth told TechCrunch that the equity part is “a little more than half.”

In 2004, Gupshup — derived from Indian slang meaning “conversations” — started as a platform to help businesses connect with their customers through text messages. It gained popularity as text messages were not free at the time, and people were seeking ways to send messages to their friends and community groups. However, as communication shifted from short messaging service (SMS) to WhatsApp and Rich Communication Services (RCS), the startup moved to these avenues with its chatbot services. Now, as AI has become a catchall term, and AI agents — software that can perform specific tasks on behalf of users — have emerged everywhere, Gupshup has started enabling businesses to deploy agents.

“There’s a lot of demand coming from enterprises. Everybody needs to build these AI agents, which work through messaging like RCS and WhatsApp or through voice. So, building out these agents, there’s huge demand, and we need to support it,” Seth said.

Globally, AI agents are gaining traction, with startups building them drawing strong investor interest. Tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are also exploring how to bring more of these agents to users through their own platforms. The result: competition is heating up.

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Gupshup does not view the rising competition as a threat. Seth pointed to the startup’s substantial install base — which exceeds 50,000 customers across more than 100 countries — and its track record of product innovation, driven by years of experience in business messaging, strategic acquisitions, and internal R&D.

“Businesses cannot use simple foundation models off the shelf and just put them in front of customers. They need a lot of customization to be done, and that’s where Gupshup comes in. That’s what we provide,” he noted.

Since its last round in July 2021, the startup “tripled” its revenue and grew its profitability, Sheth said. However, it is unclear whether that resulted in an increased valuation, as, he said, this latest round was not priced.

“As a founder, you focus on value, and the valuation will follow,” Seth said when asked whether he still considers the startup a unicorn. “We operate ourselves like we are going to be a big company.”

Alongside expanding geographically, the startup aims to utilize its fresh funding to enhance its products, which are used in industries including automotive, banking, e-commerce, fintech, media, payments, retail, and travel. Its products also include click-to-chat ads, an AI campaign copilot, agent assist, and campaign manager.

Gupshup claims to power over 120 billion messages annually for thousands of enterprises. Looking ahead, the startup sees an IPO as its next major milestone.

“We’re talking to all our advisors, lawyers, bankers, accountants, and so on, to figure this out,” Seth said.

The startup has no specific timeline for its public listing, although Seth told TechCrunch that it could happen in 18–24 months.

Gupshup is exploring whether it should list on Indian stock exchanges — a move that makes strategic sense, as the startup views India, where WhatsApp dominates, as a more favorable market. Among the reasons: it’s easier to communicate its story to local retail investors, who are more familiar with WhatsApp and understand how Gupshup’s products, including its AI agents, operate within the platform. However, since Gupshup is domiciled in the U.S., a flip to India would trigger tax liabilities, which could require additional funding.

The IPO “is the one thing that we don’t control entirely. The calendar depends as much on external factors as it does on the company,” Seth said.

SpaceX employees are more likely to be injured while working at Starbase than any of its other manufacturing facilities, according to company worker safety records reviewed by TechCrunch.

Starbase, a sprawling launch-and-manufacturing site that recently incorporated as its own Texas city, logged injury rates almost six times higher than the average for comparable space vehicle manufacturing outfits and nearly three times higher than aerospace manufacturing as a whole in 2024, according to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data released in May. That outsized injury rate has persisted since 2019, when SpaceX began sharing Starbase injury data with the federal regulator. 

Starbase is home to SpaceX’s most ambitious program: a fully reusable, ultra-heavy-lift rocket called Starship. The company has been moving at a breakneck pace to bring Starship online to launch Starlink internet satellites and other payloads. 

Since Starship’s first orbital test in April 2023, SpaceX has attempted eight additional integrated flights. During three of those tests, the company made history by catching the massive Super Heavy booster with “chopstick” arms attached to the launch tower. 

The data suggests that SpaceX’s rapid progress comes at a cost. And while injury rates alone don’t provide a complete picture of the safety culture at Starbase, they do offer a rare glimpse into the working conditions of the world’s leading space company. 

Breaking down Starbase numbers

Starbase City, an unincorporated town in Texas. Image Credits:SpaceX

OSHA uses a standardized safety metric called Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) to measure a company’s safety record and compare it to industry peers, like Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance. The publicly available data has limitations. It doesn’t distinguish between minor injuries like stitches versus serious incidents such as amputations. 

TechCrunch calculated the TRIR based on that data, which includes the total number of incidents and total number of hours worked by SpaceX employees at each site. 

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Starbase, which plays a central role in SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s mission to make life multi-planetary, is an outlier in the company and across the industry as a whole. Its TRIR topped out at 4.27 injuries per 100 workers in 2024, when it employed an average of 2,690 workers, according to the data submitted to OSHA. Injured Starbase employees were unable to perform their normal job duties for a total of 3,558 restricted-duty days, plus 656 lost-time days where injuries made them unable to work at all. 

Starbase is classified by the U.S. government as a space vehicle manufacturing operation. The injury rate in this sector has fallen dramatically since 1994, dropping from 4.2 injuries per 100 workers to 0.7 injuries per 100 workers in 2023, according to historical data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (BLS calculates these rates through its annual company surveys, which asks for the same information found in OSHA’s worker injury forms.) But despite major changes in safety processes across the industry, Starbase is closer to the rates of 30 years ago. 

The injury rate across all of SpaceX’s manufacturing facilities — which includes an engine development and testing site in McGregor, Texas; a Starlink satellite manufacturing complex in Bastrop, Texas; the Falcon rocket complex in Hawthorne, California; and another satellite manufacturing site in Redmond, Washington — is 2.28. 

These other facilities report lower TRIR rates, though most still exceed the industry averages. For instance, 2024 data shows TRIR rates 2.48 at McGregor, 3.49 at Bastrop, 1.43 at Hawthorne, 2.89 at the Redmond site. The 2024 TRIR for aerospace manufacturing as a whole is 1.6. 

SpaceX also operates several non-manufacturing sites, including barge operations off both coasts, offices in Sunnyvale, California, and launch sites at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Space Force Base. 

Former OSHA Chief of Staff Debbie Berkowitz told TechCrunch via email that Starbase’s TRIR “is a red flag that there are serious safety issues that need to be addressed.” 

However, there is a debate among safety professionals about whether TRIR is the most reliable metric for assessing and predicting injury rates, particularly serious incidents like fatalities, and especially for small companies. A recent paper on TRIR questioned its statistical validity and advocated that organizations use alternative measures of safety performance instead. 

Of the 14 OSHA inspections at SpaceX facilities over the past four years, six involved accidents and injuries at Starbase. That includes a partial finger amputation in 2021 and a crane collapse in June 2025. The latter inspection is still ongoing. Investigations by other news outlets including Reuters have uncovered hundreds of previously unreported worker injuries, including crushed limbs and one fatality. 

The 2024 injury rate at Starbase marks an improvement to that of the prior year, which topped out at 5.9 injuries per 100 workers in 2023 and 4.8 injuries in 2022. But it still leads among SpaceX’s land-based facilities, and is second overall only to its west coast booster recovery operations, which has a TRIR of 7.6. 

OSHA confirmed TechCrunch’s calculation of Starbase’s TRIR over email, but otherwise did not respond to questions regarding that location’s injury rate. SpaceX did not respond to request for comment.   

NASA’s stake

NASA Crew-2 Mission in 2021 returns to Earth. Image Credits:SpaceX under a CC BY NC 2.0 license.

NASA has a major stake in Starship’s development. The agency is counting on using the rocket to return humans to the Moon before the end of this decade, and it is paying more than $4 billion to SpaceX for two crewed Starship flights to the lunar surface. 

Both the contract for the Starship lander and SpaceX’s contract for its Commercial Crew services to the International Space Station contain particular clauses that allow the agency to take action in the case of a major breach of safety, such as a fatality or a “willful” or “repeat” OSHA violation. 

While a persistently high TRIR rate can be evidence of a safety problem, it is not an automatic trigger for action, and does not fall under the definition of a “major breach of safety” in their contracts. 

“NASA interacts frequently with its partners, including SpaceX, to ensure safety from a mission assurance perspective, and remains in regular contact with the company during normal contract administration,” a NASA spokesperson told TechCrunch in response to questions about the company’s TRIR. “Safety is paramount to NASA’s mission success. The agency continues to work with all our commercial partners to build and maintain a healthy safety culture.” 

Among rocket makers with vehicles in operation, Starbase still leads the pack: at ULA’s manufacturing facility in Decatur, Alabama, the TRIR is 1.12 injuries per 100 workers; at Blue Origin’s rocket park on the coast of Florida, the rate is 1.09.