Why WhatsApp might be India's next commerce frontier - and the Bangalore startup building the rails for it

For Nutan, a Bangalore-based construction materials delivery company, WhatsApp had already become the primary channel for customer orders.

Contractors would message requirements for cement, steel, and other materials throughout the day. But managing those orders manually became increasingly difficult because pricing varied based on quantity.

A customer ordering 20 cement bags paid a different rate than someone ordering 200. Delivery timelines also changed based on location and stock availability.

Traditionally, building a system capable of handling those workflows would require custom software development.

Instead, Nutan used VibeFlow, an AI platform developed by Bangalore-based startup Mappstore.

The company simply described its pricing logic in plain English — including quantity-based pricing slabs, payment collection, and delivery coordination — and the platform generated a fully functional WhatsApp workflow in under a minute.

Customers can now place orders, receive dynamic pricing, complete payments, and confirm deliveries directly through chat.

Founded by Sooraj Kumar, Lakshya Sharma, and Manu George as part of the founding team, Mappstore is creating a WhatsApp conversational AI platform for businesses that transforms plain-English requirements into automated commerce workflows. 

Its core product allows businesses to generate operational workflows from natural language prompts. A business owner can describe processes such as bookings, customer support, lead capture, payments, or logistics coordination, and the platform automatically generates a working conversational system integrating APIs, payment gateways, CRM actions, forms, and automation logic.

“We realised businesses don’t actually want software complexity,” says co-founder Lakshya Sharma. “They want outcomes. AI is finally good enough to translate business requirements directly into operational workflows.”

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

Mappstore’s growth is also being driven by its WhatsApp automation reseller program, which allows agencies and consultants to launch white-labelled AI-powered WhatsApp automation businesses on top of the company’s infrastructure while operating under their own branding and pricing. 

The company is also building what it calls a conversational commerce discovery layer — a platform where users can discover and interact directly with AI-powered WhatsApp businesses.

“If websites had search engines and apps had app stores, conversational firms will also need discovery infrastructure,” says Sharma. “We think conversational commerce becomes a much larger category over the next few years.”

With more than 500 million messenger users in India, Mappstore’s broader bet is that conversational workflows could eventually evolve into a new operating layer for small business commerce.