Businesses have spent the past few years bolting together separate tools for customer support, email marketing, SMS, and live chat.
Circeus‘s latest acquisition consolidates many of those functions into an all-in-one conversational commerce platform operating across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and website chat.
The London-based AI-native holding company has acquired Dondy, an all-in-one conversational commerce platform used by more than 70,000 businesses globally. Dondy will now join Shop Circle, Circeus’s agentic commerce software division.
How it all works
“Despite WhatsApp’s enormous reach, most businesses have historically treated it primarily as a messaging or customer-support channel rather than a fully integrated commerce channel. AI is increasingly making it possible to turn tools that perform tasks into systems that deliver outcomes, and that is the model we are applying across our portfolio,” Luca Cartechini, co-founder and CEO of Circeus, and Carlos Villanueva, GM of Shop Circle and part of Circeus’ founding team, tell Tech Funding News.
In practice, Dondy’s AI agents sit inside customer conversations across its supported channels. A customer might receive a casual reminder for items left in their cart, or a notice on delivery timing. Over time, Dondy is designed to handle full tasks, such as completing a purchase or resolving a return, prompted by the customer in the chat thread.
The technology is already live in production: Dondy’s AI agents sell and support customers for thousands of merchants today, and 70% of conversations for merchants using the agents are handled and resolved end to end by AI.
Importantly, a user can ask Dondy any question and it will provide a tailored answer, rather than a scripted reply. It operates around the clock and operates in multiple languages, so a merchant’s WhatsApp presence isn’t limited by the hours and language barriers of a support team.
“We are excited to join Circeus. We believe that together we can grow Dondy 10x in the coming years, learning, improving and becoming more efficient through collaboration with the group’s business units and companies. Together with Circeus we can continue our dream: to build one of the central platforms in commerce, helping brands grow and operate more efficiently with AI,” the co-founders of Dondy, Tamir Or, Or Schreiber and Inbal Katz tell Tech Funding News.
$100m in orders, and barely scratching the surface
Dondy already routes over $100 million in annual merchant orders and more than a million customer conversations a year through WhatsApp. With a global user base above 3 billion, the volume on WhatsApp represents a small fraction of a channel most Western commerce software still treats as secondary to email and SMS.
Dondy currently holds the top App Store ranking in Shopify’s “WhatsApp” and “WhatsApp Marketing” categories.
Circeus’ roadmap intentionally pushes toward software that can act rather than just assist.
Instead of merchants drafting campaigns and replying to tickets, Dondy is meant to run those common workflows autonomously. Over time, the platform is intended to handle customer interactions end to end across every channel, including email, TikTok, Telegram and any new channel that emerges.
These tasks include but are not limited to recovering abandoned carts, re-engaging dormant customers, and pushing upsells inside a live conversation, without a person approving each step. Dondy delivers AI through the channels merchants already use, sparing them from adopting a new tool from scratch.
Fitting the Circeus playbook
The acquisition tracks a pattern that Circeus has repeated across its portfolio.
The holding company searches for software that businesses can’t live without, and then provides AI augmentation to propel the enterprise further. This approach mirrors why Circeus acquired document automation provider Encodian earlier this month. Encodian was already a category leader embedded in a widely used ecosystem rather than competing to build reach from zero.
Circeus recently closed new equity funding from the EBRD and other investors and has more than $100m available to deploy. Several acquisitions of mission-critical software, to be evolved with AI, are set to complete over the coming months.
Circeus’ expert AI teams will layer additional AI capabilities across Dondy’s product and processes, increasing efficiency and strengthening its position as an AI-native company.
Dondy now plugs into the group’s shared AI platform and engineering muscle, and inherits playbooks on product, pricing, and operations that have already been tested elsewhere in the portfolio. Dondy will continue to be supported by its existing team and, increasingly by Circeus’s broader internal platform and central AI team.
Circeus will now help evolve Dondy’s proven AI agents into fully autonomous sales, support and marketing agents, all steered by a unified AI layer. Enhanced automation under the hood will be a priority, along with tighter integrations and a broader AI-native commerce platform able to manage the customer journey end to end.
This article is produced in a content partnership with Circeus.