Chat company Smooch raises $7.6 million

Montreal-based Smooch raised $7.6 million in its latest round of funding, the company announced today.

The round was led by Real Ventures and iNovia Capital, with participation from TA Associates and Smooch’s founders.

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The money will be used to hire more than 20 people to work in offices in San Francisco and Montreal in order to expand the company’s open source chat client, Smooch Conversation Cloud.

“Smooch will use this financing round to expand its support for consumer messaging channels and business software vendors, and to continue to build its team,” the company said in a statement Monday.

Smooch Conversation Cloud can be used on websites and inside apps. In June, Smooch announced that conversations started in its live chat client, often seen in the bottom right hand corner of websites, can automatically be transferred and synced between Facebook Messenger, Line, WeChat, Twilio, and other chat platforms.

“I think what we’ve done is really thought about how much more useful we can make website chat to individual customers and visitors to a website, because the minute you break it free from the web page, then it turns into a relationship with the customer that lasts even after the browser is closed,” cofounder and head of product Mike Gozzo told VentureBeat in an interview in June.