Wassist raises $1.1M in pre-seed round led by Playfair to let every business ship an AI agent on WhatsApp in minutes, without engineers

London, 8 June 2026 - Wassist, the no-code platform that lets businesses deploy a custom AI agent on WhatsApp without writing a line of code, today announced a $1.1M pre-seed round led by Playfair. Participating investors include: exited founder of Indeed, Paul Forster; Meta board member, Charlie Songhurst; Founder and CEO of Cleo, Barney Hussey-Yeo; as well as angels from Balderton Capital and Dawn Capital. The funding will be used to accelerate growth and product development.

Wassist was started solo by founder and CEO Josh Warwick, who created the core of the product at weekend hackathons over a 10 month period. In this time, it reached more than 2,000 end-user conversations, now at 80,000, with no paid marketing. The company recently made its first hire, was selected as part of Balderton’s Launched Programme, and is headquartered in London.

How it works

Building on the WhatsApp Business API is normally a multi-month engineering project. There is a 24-hour message window to respect, templates to get approved, webhooks to configure, media handling, typing indicators, routing, and more. Wassist compresses all of that into a single workflow. A brand types its store URL and gets a working AI ambassador in minutes, with no engineering team and no edits to the store's theme code.

A shopper clicks the WhatsApp logo on a brand's mobile site and is met by the brand's AI ambassador: an agent trained in the brand's voice that answers product questions, handles order updates, and recommends items based on past conversations. Most "WhatsApp commerce" products today route the customer back to a website to pay. Wassist completes the purchase in the thread. The shopper can add to cart and payment happens though the website checkout - all shown in-app. Receipts and shipping updates arrive in the same conversation.

The product is pre-configured for e-commerce. Cart recovery, order updates, and product recommendations come built in. It works alongside Yotpo, Klaviyo, Recharge, and the rest of the Shopify stack.

Why brands use Wassist

Most brands today reach customers through one-way channels (email, ads, broadcast notifications) that customers ignore. Email open rates sit at around 20 percent. WhatsApp messages open at 98 percent, according to Meta’s latest consumer report. Click-through rates run 20 to 60 percent on WhatsApp versus 1 to 2 percent on email. Cart recovery, in Wassist's data, is 4x more effective than email.

With Wassist, brands own the customer relationship. When customers ask AI assistants like ChatGPT or Google's Gemini about a product, the conversation belongs to OpenAI or Google, and the brand never sees what was asked. With Wassist, the brand sees the conversation, learns what customers actually want, and can build a direct one-to-one relationship, in a channel three billion people open.

"WhatsApp is about to become the default commerce channel for businesses. That is the default already in Brazil, India and Mexico, and the only reason it hadn't landed in Europe and the US is that previously conversations couldn't scale without huge customer service teams. LLMs have changed that. OpenAI wants those commerce conversations to happen in ChatGPT, and Google wants them in Search, but two billion people already open WhatsApp every day to talk to people they trust. We built Wassist so every brand can own those conversations in the channel customers actually use, in minutes rather than months, without handing them to a Big Tech intermediary."

— Josh Warwick, founder and CEO, Wassist

Customers

Wassist customers include Hollywood Browzer, a beauty brand that uses Wassist to help shoppers navigate the technical questions around its products, turning FAQ traffic that would once have stalled a sale into completed purchases.

"We're really happy to be working with Wassist to better serve our existing customers and help new customers find the products they need. It's been a great experience working with the team to date, as they've been super proactive in helping us better utilise WhatsApp for our business."

— Alice Murphy, Head of Marketing, Hollywood Browzer

"Wassist compressed days of setup into hours, handling everything from linking our WhatsApp Business account to managing the API and creating our agents. Changes that used to take days were shipped in under 30 minutes, and the team moves fast enough that it felt more like a collaboration than a vendor relationship. As founders, we see WhatsApp as no longer optional for business, and Wassist's MCP compatibility means any brand can plug in and offer it as a live interface to their AI tools."

— Hayyaan Ahmad, Co-Founder, Round Treasury

Why now

WhatsApp expanded its Business API in 2022. LLMs became cheap and good enough to make natural conversation affordable. In November 2024, Meta cut the cost of outbound messaging to zero, making proactive customer engagement on WhatsApp economically viable for a small business for the first time. In countries like India and Brazil, WhatsApp is already the default channel for small business commerce. In Europe and the US, the consumer base is there, the business tooling is not, and the window to build it has just opened.

"No one has built a truly agentic WhatsApp layer for small businesses. The recent changes to the WhatsApp Business API, the models, and the economics have only just aligned. Three billion people are already on the platform, and in markets like India and Brazil it is already how the majority of small businesses sell and engage with their customers. We believe that Europe and the US will follow fast. The combination of the world's most trusted messaging platform and genuinely intelligent conversation, applied to commerce, is a true step change."

— Lucia Polverino, Investor at Playfair

About Wassist

Wassist is a no-code platform that turns WhatsApp into a one-to-one sales, service, and marketing channel for businesses. Starting with e-commerce, brands use Wassist to deploy AI ambassadors that answer questions, recommend products, recover carts, and complete purchases, all inside a single WhatsApp thread. Wassist is a Meta Business Partner, is based in London, and was founded in 2025. Find Wassist at wassist.app.

Josh Warwick, the company's founder and CEO, studied computer science at Oxford and was Technical Lead at Theodo, an engineering agency, where he built products from zero to one for corporates and startups including Admiral and Cleo. He then joined [Ark])https://www.projectark.co.uk/), a proptech startup, as co-founder and CTO. He has been building with WhatsApp since 2023 and has gone deep on the nuance of the platform, with its own rules around message timing, media, and conversation flow, at a level few engineers in Europe have.

About Playfair

Playfair is a generalist fund focused exclusively on pre-seed investing. Based in London, Playfair invests across the UK and Europe with an intentionally high-conviction, low-volume approach: making six investments a year out of their third $70m fund and preserving time, capital, and resources to help companies post-investment. Their 78% Series A graduation rate is approximately 4x the industry average and their founders have raised over $3bn of follow-on capital since 2013. Playfair has backed 100+ companies, including Thought Machine, Orca AI, Protex AI, StackOne, and Nory.