On October 18th, Vonage completed its acquisition of Singapore-based Conversational Commerce specialist Jumper.ai. Founded in 2017, Jumper.ai has spent the last four years building a software platform that enables brands to engage in conversations with customers over the social networks and messaging networks they use every day. They call it “end-to-end” because they enable those customers to carry out searches, conversations with live agents or bots and ultimately complete purchases without ever leaving their preferred social or messaging platform.

In a video briefing with analysts Savinay Berry, Vonage’s EVP of Product and Engineering, noted that Jumper.ai fills a number of “holes in the fabric of Conversational Commerce,” an opportunity area that Vonage expects to exceed $25 billion in the next 3-5 years. Conversation starters can be text messages or alerts that originate from a mix of leading international brands that already includes Burger King, Estee Lauder, Disney, Unilever and many others.

Berry encapsulated Vonage’s vision and strategy in the idea that “Storefronts are conversations.” He also said something to the effect that the acquisition of Jumper.ai “fills holes in Vonage’s vision of end-to-end conversational commerce.” Indeed, Vonage has been quite successful in acquiring and integrating companies that, in quick succession, added a library of microservices (Nexmo) and a leading Contact Center offering (NewVoiceMedia), a platform for video-based interactions (TokBox) and a specialist in AI-infused voice services (Over.ai). The impact of Jumper.ai is two-fold. First it will beef up each brand’s ability to start conversations with an outbound text (permissioned of course) or alert. More importantly, it makes the check out or “point-of-sale” an integral part or (more accurately) culmination of each conversation.

Amid all the talk of journey mapping, tracking in a cookieless future and concern over surveillance, there is brilliance in pursuing a “storefronts are conversations” model… And vice-versa. Conversations over messaging and social platforms now embrace interactions with search engines, bots, live agents in contact centers, and live sales personnel in physical stores. Vonage’s most direct competitor in this respect is Twilio has made a lot of profit from bulk delivery of SMS-text. Jumper.ai is a different animal because of integrations it has developed for “back-end” systems for payments (Stripe, Paypal and others), eCommerce (Amazon, Shopify and others), marketing services (Zendesk, Hubspot and others) and fulfillment (Easyship, Simply Post and others).

The ultimate outcome, in Berry’s words, is for “customers to make a purchase from the message itself”. With the acquisition of Jumper.ai, Vonage has the chops to accomplish that outcome at any point in the course of an asynchronous thread of messages, also known as conversational commerce.

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