Korawad Chearavanont

Chearavanont founded Eko Communications as a mobile chat app in spring 2012, when he was 17 in his boarding school dorm in New Jersey and took a year off after high school to build his startup.[1][4] Upon entering college, however, he wanted to focus on his startup full-time so he made a deal with his family that he could quit college if he raised $5 million from major venture capitals.[4] In 2014, he secured $1 million seed funding from 500 Startups.[5] A year later, he received $5.7 million funding from Shanghai-based Gobi Ventures, the second-largest such funding for a Thai venture.[6] Having met the terms, Chearavanont put Columbia on hold in order to concentrate on his start-up full-time. In 2017, he raised $1 million from Japanese trading house Itochu.[7] In November 2018, he raised $20 million in B round funding from Sinar Mas Digital Ventures, the venture capital unit of the Indonesian conglomerate Sinar Mas Group, increasing the total funding to $28.7 million.[8]

In founding Eko, Chearavanont hopes to fill gaps in the enterprise collaboration market left by tech giants such as Slack, Microsoft, and Facebook by accommodating more users simultaneously in a group chat and by focusing on the operational and logistical aspects of the company as opposed to solely workplace chats and collaboration.[1][4] Furthermore, his business taps into the growing mobile market in Asia, whereas major tech firms are more attuned to the habits of Americans and Westerners in which desktops and laptops play a bigger role.[9] Since its founding, Eko signed on notable firms such as Bangkok Bank, Thanachart Bank, BEC-TERO, telecommunications firms True Corporation and Telekom Malaysia, and non-profit One Young World as clients, with five million active users across 100 enterprise clients throughout Asia, Europe, North America.[4][8][10][11] Most recently, his business has saw a 200% surge in revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic as demand for remote work technologies has boomed.[12] In June 2020, his company acquired a local AI chatbot firm, ConvoLab, and formed a new parent firm as part of its digital, and global expansion plan.[11]

In 2016, he was listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia under the Enterprise Tech category.[13]