MessageBird raises $60m Series A funding
We are thrilled to announce that MessageBird has raised a $60m Series A round led by Accel in Silicon Valley, with significant participation from Atomico in London. We are also very happy to count Y Combinator as a co-investor in this round. This investment will help us grow our teams around the world, raise brand awareness on a global scale, and strengthen our balance sheet to ensure we continue to be a reliable partner for large enterprises.
We founded MessageBird in 2011 after experiencing firsthand how poor the quality of service of most communication providers was at the time. We needed a quick and reliable way to verify users via SMS in 50 countries for my previous company, Zaypay. Messages were arriving too late or not at all. Since Zaypay provided an API to pay for virtual goods by charging them to your phone bill, the lack of quality actually led to a direct financial loss for our customers. So we did what any tech-minded company that Gets Shit Done would: we built what we needed ourselves.
We integrated with the Dutch-based carrier KPN and launched our first messaging product mid 2010. Our connectivity was so much faster and cheaper than anything on the market that within a few months, our old messaging vendor asked if we would be their supplier. So I sold Zaypay and founded MessageBird. Since then, we’ve built out the largest global direct-to-carrier network in the world that supports enterprise-level communication needs, all built on APIs that developers love to work with.
The large enterprises we work with today simply cannot afford their communications to be compromised. The quality of your communications is a direct reflection of the caliber of your business. If you’re on a sales call and the connection is poor, you won’t close the deal. If a new user is creating an account and the verification SMS doesn’t go through, that account won’t get created. Dropped calls and undelivered messages result in missed opportunities and lost business. We work hard every single day to solve that problem on a global scale.
We provide a secure, fast and cost effective way for enterprises to build their communication tools on our platform. Each carrier works differently and every country has different regulations. It’s our job to make sure your messages and voice calls get through this web of rules and regulations reliably. A customer simply pings our API and the result is magical: a message pops up or a phone starts ringing in seconds, with the potential to reach over 7 billion people worldwide.
This Series A led by Accel marks our first round of external funding. So why did we stop bootstrapping? Our mission is to connect every business to the world via our communication hub. In order to do that, we wanted to work with investors who have been there and done it all before — either through their investments or themselves.
With Accel and Atomico, it was love at first sight. From our first coffee meetings, I was blown away by the engagement in our conversations, their vision of the industry, and their aggressive drive to win. Accel has helped build some of the world’s most well known companies that we use every day, and Atomico was founded by Niklas Zennström who founded Skype, sold it, bought it back and then sold it again.
We welcome Miles and Hiro to our board. We’re honored to work with two people who understand us, support us and fit our culture perfectly. Some of the best advice I learned from participating in Y Combinator is to choose your board members wisely, because it’s a marriage you can’t get out of.
Many people have helped us get here along the way. I’d like say a special thank you to the following people:
Bob Violier, René Feiner and Ihab Matta who are all on the founding team and have worked day and night to get us to where we are today.
Adriaan Mol for starting this journey with me and supporting us along the way.
Justin Kan for spending hours and hours giving me advice on fundraising and teaching me the ins and outs of Silicon Valley.
Anu Hariharan, Ali Rowghani, Jason Kwon, Jared Friedman and Aaron Harris from Y Combinator. They truly live up to their founder support and can always be reached when we need advice.
Our entire team. Each of them works relentlessly to make MessageBird great and truly make the company feel like a family.
And finally — an extra extra special thank you to Mayke Nagtegaal our COO. She’s spent day and night with me the past months securing our funding, while keeping the company running smoothly while I was travelling the world.
Today marks the beginning of a new era for our customers, our team and myself. I’m super excited to Get Shit Done and continue building out our roadmap of products that will change global communications for the better.
You can learn more about MessageBird and our team on our website.
