MessageBird, the Dutch start-up messaging firm, has grounded $60 Million in 1st round of funding, the biggest early-stage venture capital spending ever in the history into a European software firm.
MessageBird assists 15,000 organizations communicate or send messages with users via voice, chat, or video. Clients vary from firms such as SAP, Uber, and Heineken, to semi-public organizations and governments that utilize it for medical appointment notifications and emergency messages. The Amsterdam-located company fights in the cloud-based fast-growing messaging market with over a dozen companies, comprising Blackberry, Twilio, Urban Airship, and Nexmo.
The strangely bug 1st round of fundraising is owing to the firm having had almost no financial support from outside since it was established in 2011, which pushed it to be money-making from the beginning. It anticipates generating income of $100 Million this year. “We have been developing almost 100% each year for a few years now,” the 33-year-old chief executive and founder of MessageBird, Robert Vis, claimed to the media in an interview. “We are always seeking at how to maintain that”.
The supposed Series A round of funding worth $60 Million was headed by Silicon Valley’s Accel Partners and connected by Atomico, a leading European venture company, paired with Y-Combinator, the seed stage investor. Messaging software producers encounter rising rivalry comprising from cloud services broad-based operators such as Cisco, Microsoft, and Amazon, which previously this year launched its Connect services of embedded telephone at prices at almost 40% less as compared to that of Twilio’s, one analyst estimated.
What keeps MessageBird apart is that it has built interfaces and forged deals with 220 telecom providers all over the world, making it the only analogous platform operating on infrastructure of telecoms carrier-grade more willingly than over the Internet. This permits it to guarantee quality and speed delivery of messages at reduced prices.
“Until MessageBird, no one in the segment had productively built the technology and relationships at scale to straightly link into telecommunications carriers all over the globe,” claimed Hiro Tamura, the Atomico Partner who will join the board of the company. “Its services can reach millions of mobile handsets,” he further claimed.
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