Kata.ai’s revenue leap sets stage for Middle East expansion

It took Kata.ai, a Jakarta-based conversational AI firm, eight years to become profitable on an EBITDA basis. It hit the milestone last year, owing mostly to surging enterprise demand for AI tools that can directly drive revenue.

In 2025, revenue has grown more than 2x, while its EBITDA has risen by more than 3x, co-founder and CEO Irzan Raditya tells Tech in Asia. However, he didn’t share additional details.

Irzan Raditya, co-founder and CEO of Kata.ai / Photo credit: Tech in Asia

Besides customer service agents, Kata.ai is also known for its AI chat-commerce features. Its chatbots help brands interact with customers, handling everything from displaying product catalogs to processing payments post-transaction through integrations with payment gateways.

Most of Kata.ai’s clients are large corporations. In total, it serves some 250 companies, including telco giants such as Telkomsel and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and banks like OCBC and SeaBank. Government institutions such as Indonesia’s Ministry of Manpower are also on its client list.

Many brands and companies now have WhatsApp Business accounts to handle transactions via chat. At 112 million, Indonesia has the third-largest number of WhatsApp users in the world, after India and Brazil.

A 2024 Boston Consulting Group survey of some 300 businesses in Indonesia found that an overwhelming 90% of customers liked using messaging channels across all stages of their purchase journey. Among them, pure messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp were the most effective.

“When enterprise demand for AI finally surged, we were already there as pioneers,” Raditya recalls.

What’s driving growth

Founded in 2016, Kata.ai’s first product was a text-based chatbot for customer support. Its offerings have since expanded to include voice chat and interactive avatars, which are also used in customer service.

We’ve seen some customers grow their portfolio with us by 100x from the start of the relationship until now – and some by 1,000x.

Kata.ai can handle more than 40 languages – including Bahasa Indonesia – depending on market needs. The company’s chatbots are fine-tuned based on existing large language models on the market. Raditya didn’t specify which.

The company now generates “tens of millions of dollars” in annual recurring revenue based on October revenue, Raditya says. He adds that to date, Kata.ai’s chat-commerce services have handled up to US$2.5 billion in transaction volumes for customers. It doesn’t earn commissions on these transactions.

“Everybody is trying to adopt AI – whether that’s to cut costs, increase revenue, or improve some key metrics,” Raditya explains.

For Kata.ai, the momentum it’s now seeing comes from its focus on use cases that can generate revenue for its clients – such as those facilitating transactions or payments – as they drive a tangible return on investment.

“5x to 10x” more profitable

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