PNN

Bangalore (Karnataka) [India], May 28: Bangalore | May 2026: Every admissions season, Hyderabad-based IT training company SkillDzire faced the same operational bottleneck. Prospective students would flood the company's WhatsApp number with repetitive questions around courses, fees, timings, certifications, and placements. The team spent hours manually responding before conversations even reached the counselling stage.

'It became difficult to manage at scale,' the company says.

Today, much of that process runs automatically.

Using VibeFlow, an AI platform built by Bangalore-based startup Mappstore, SkillDzire created a WhatsApp workflow that answers queries, shares course information, collects lead details, and manages student intake -- without writing code or building custom software.

Founded by Sooraj Kumar, Lakshya Sharma, and Manu George as part of the founding team, Mappstore is positioning itself as an AI-driven WhatsApp business automation platform for payments, customer support, lead capture, and conversational commerce workflows.

Its core proposition is straightforward: businesses describe their requirements in plain English, and the platform generates a working operational workflow around them.

A business can automate customer support, appointment bookings, payments, lead capture, onboarding flows, or delivery coordination directly through chat. The workflows integrate APIs, payment gateways, forms, CRM systems, logistics providers, and automation logic -- typically in under a minute.

'We kept seeing businesses already operating entirely through WhatsApp,' says co-founder Sooraj Kumar. 'The opportunity was to build infrastructure that could convert those conversations into structured business operations using AI.'

Mappstore says more than 1,000 businesses are currently using the platform, with growth averaging roughly 50 percent month-on-month this quarter.

'Most business owners don't care about workflow builders or automation terminology,' says co-founder Lakshya Sharma. 'They care about outcomes -- faster responses, more conversions, smoother operations. We wanted AI to make that process extremely simple.'

Underneath the conversational layer, VibeFlow functions more like a workflow engine than a traditional chatbot builder. The platform can process Razorpay payments, trigger logistics flows through partners like Shadowfax, collect structured customer information, parse PDFs, and coordinate CRM actions in real time.

The startup's rapid expansion has been supported by a growing network of resellers who deploy conversational workflows for local businesses using Mappstore's infrastructure. That partner-led model is helping the company scale without relying on a traditional enterprise sales approach.

But Mappstore is now expanding beyond workflow automation itself.

The company has launched mappsto.re, which it describes as the world's largest WhatsApp chatbot discovery platform -- a marketplace where users can discover and interact directly with AI-powered conversational businesses.

The founders compare the idea to the early evolution of search engines and app stores.

'If websites needed Google and apps needed app stores, conversational businesses will eventually need discovery infrastructure too,' says Sharma. 'We think conversational commerce becomes a much larger category over the next few years.'

India's existing behaviour patterns may support that thesis. With more than 500 million WhatsApp users, a large share of small business commerce in the country already happens informally through messaging.

Mappstore's broader bet is that those fragmented interactions can evolve into programmable, AI-driven storefronts -- and eventually into a discoverable commerce ecosystem of their own.

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