The Origin of Coral Messaging
How the seeds were planted for the founding of Coral Messaging
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The Origin of Coral Messaging
Every now and again, someone asks us how Coral came to be, and the short story is that Teresa Overskei and I (Louis Moynihan) met at WhatsApp / Meta where we became aware of a significant market need, which was the impetus for us starting Coral. Teresa and I both spent six years at Meta, most of our time building and scaling the WhatsApp API. Most meetings these days are shorter than thirty minutes, so we usually leave it at that, but the details of the origin story are much more interesting….
I started working on product innovation for the WhatsApp API for business, right before the WhatsApp API was first launched in August 2018. At that time, there were approximately two billion users on the WhatsApp consumer app, which meant that the business demand for the API was very strong. Businesses were able to create a one-to-one chat with customers at scale, for customer service and marketing use cases. It was a fun time, and the growth was very positive.
There was a derivative of the WhatsApp API also live, and it was called WhatsApp Groups API. It allowed businesses to create a group and manage that group just like a consumer would manage a family group on the WhatsApp consumer app. JPMorgan came to us asking for additional Groups API features to give them visibility into group chats so they could fulfill their regulatory obligations to archive all conversations. In separate discussions with Gucci, it also became clear that luxury retailers needed insight into clienteling conversations between their employees and buyers. Meanwhile, Teresa was the right-hand woman to the leader of Business API products and was managing operations, resourcing, legal and finance for the growth of the WhatsApp API and was fielding similar inbound requests from corporates like Citigroup.
This need cut across many verticals and had some common characteristics:
- High-priced item or
- Long sales cycle or
- Ongoing relationship management
In all of these situations, buyers were chatting with sellers over WhatsApp and the business had no visibility, and sellers had no productivity tools. What made this feature need even more valuable to all parties was the revenue attribution; these were the best customers, the best prospects, so there was always a high correlation to revenue.
I did what any product Innovation professional would do: I did the research, compiled the asks, measured the total addressable market, partnered with the engineers, and produced a recommendation to leadership to expand the feature set of WhatsApp Groups API. Meta did what most tech titans should do: they rejected it on the grounds that there was already a $100 billion opportunity available in the standard WhatsApp API, and that foundation needed to be in place first. Instead, because of increased spam, the original Groups API was deprecated. Deprecating the Groups API in 2021 was the correct call at that time. Technically, the WhatsApp Groups API was in alpha and lacked a robust architecture for scale in its original form. I made the necessary internal posts, and moved on to my next project. I would love to get a screenshot of those posts, if anyone cares to risk their job, I’d be so grateful :)
In late 2023, WhatsApp decided to put the Groups API functionality back on its product roadmap but with a more scalable architecture. Teresa and I had already left WhatsApp by that time, but we both deeply understood the market opportunity for Meta, and the ecosystem opportunity to serve this slice of the market. We decided to take a leap, and Coral Messaging was born in 2024, to make software tools for employees using WhatsApp to talk with their clients and was built solely on top of the new WhatsApp Groups API. Coral was accepted into the WhatsApp alpha program for Groups API, securing early access to this new functionality when it launched on August 29 2024. Coral launched our prototype on the back of this in January 2025, and our MVP in May 2025.
As they say “the rest is history” and I’d like to thank some of the OG WhatsApp folks from those early days:
Gene Alston for asking me to work on WhatsApp Innovation in February 2018
Salil Shah for having my back in my transition from Martech to WhatsApp 2019
Thomas Kuruvilla for our deep partnership on Messenger and WhatsApp 2018 to 2021
Marco Wirasinghe for listening to the original innovation pitch January 2022
Andy Solomou at JPM for the all day workshop in London summer 2021
Scott Miller for always giving me room to be a little crazy
