Bangalore (Karnataka) [India], May 28: Deepak, who runs Bangalore-based bakery brand Cakeophilics, was facing a problem common among fast-growing food businesses. Every custom cake order required a lengthy WhatsApp conversation. Customers would send incomplete requests at odd hours, and staff members had to manually collect details such as occasion, size, dietary preferences, delivery timing, and design references before an order could even be processed.
“It became difficult to scale because so much time went into repetitive conversations,” he says.
Today, much of that intake happens automatically.
Using VibeFlow, an AI platform developed by Bangalore-based startup Mappstore, Cakeophilics built a WhatsApp workflow that guides customers through order collection, captures delivery details, confirms preferences, and routes completed briefs directly to the team — without writing code or hiring developers.
Founded by Sooraj Kumar, Lakshya Sharma, and Manu George as part of the founding team, Mappstore is building a WhatsApp chatbot and conversational commerce infrastructure platform aimed at simplifying business automation through AI.
Its core product allows businesses to describe their requirements in plain English and automatically generate working WhatsApp workflows around them.
A business owner can ask for appointment bookings, product sales, customer support, lead capture, payments, or delivery coordination, and the system generates an operational workflow integrating APIs, payment gateways, forms, logistics systems, CRM actions, and automation logic — typically in under a minute.
“We realised businesses don’t actually want complicated dashboards,” says co-founder Lakshya Sharma. “They want outcomes — bookings, payments, leads, deliveries. AI is finally good enough to translate those business requirements directly into working operational systems.” Mappstore says more than 1,000 businesses are already using the platform, with growth averaging around 50 percent month-on-month this quarter.
“With WhatsApp, the behaviour already exists,” says co-founder Sooraj Kumar. “Businesses are already selling, handling support, and managing transactions through chat. We’re building the infrastructure layer that turns those conversations into structured business workflows.” Underneath the conversational layer, VibeFlow functions more like a workflow engine than a traditional chatbot builder. The platform can process Razorpay payments, trigger delivery flows through logistics partners like Shadowfax, collect structured customer information, parse uploaded PDFs, and coordinate CRM actions in real time.
Mappstore has additionally built a reseller model that allows agencies and consultants to run white-labelled WhatsApp automation businesses on its infrastructure. The founders say the model has accelerated adoption among SMBs that typically lack access to technical implementation resources.
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 platform aggregates conversational storefronts across categories including food ordering, D2C brands, healthcare, local services, and customer support. Businesses built using VibeFlow can be listed and discovered directly through mappsto.re.
“If websites needed search engines and apps needed app stores, conversational businesses will also need discovery infrastructure,” says Sharma. “We think users will increasingly interact with businesses through AI conversations instead of traditional interfaces.” India, with more than 500 million WhatsApp users, already represents one of the world’s largest messaging-based commerce markets. Much of that activity, however, still happens manually through unstructured chats.
Mappstore’s broader thesis is that those conversations can evolve into programmable, AI-driven storefronts — and eventually into a discoverable commerce ecosystem of their own.
With more than 1,000 businesses already onboarded and growth accelerating, the startup is emerging as one of a growing number of Indian AI companies attempting to build infrastructure around conversational commerce rather than traditional software interfaces.
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