Palringo: the story so far

Messaging apps have eaten the world. They’ve been chewing for about three or four years now. You know when something’s eaten the world when you check on LinkedIn and discover that there are already “mobile messaging gurus” (though thankfully no sherpas or visionaries as yet).

To be fair though, it’s only in the last two years that people have really started paying serious attention to this market. That attention only really focused for the majority of people when Facebook swooped in and bought WhatsApp back in 2014.

For some though, messaging has been a business — and a profitable one — for a lot longer. Palringo are one of those companies that are doing incredibly well and yet don’t always get the recognition they deserve. They’re a mobile messaging platform that started up in Newcastle in 2007. That’s pre-App Store for those of you who are fans of dates. Since then there have been some shrewd shifts in the business strategy and plan as well as some really smart acquisitions in the recent past.

Palringo now has well in excess of 35m registered users and is adding a million more every month. They have over 350,000 groups within the app — many of which are based around games and gaming — hence the Free Lunch acquisition noted above.

To find out more, I sat down with Tim Rea, Palringo’s CEO to find out a little bit more about the company’s past, present and future.

Incidentally, the keener eared among you might have noticed I mentioned previous Foundercasts. This is the first one I’ve recorded in ages, but more are coming. You can check out some of the older ones here.