Cloud communications company, MessageBird, has successfully raised a phenomenal $200 million in Series C funding this October. The funding round, led by Spark Capital of Silicon Valley, will give MessageBird an incredible valuation of around $3 billion.
This funding round also featured participation from Glynn Capital, Longbow, NewView Capital, Mousse Partners, Bonnier, and LGT Lightstone. Existing investors Y Combinator, Atomico, and Accel followed on too.
Crucially, MessageBird spent 6 years mostly bootstrapped, but it claimed to be profitable from day one. Instead of going through the Y Combinator accelerator program, the company earned its first institutional investment in 2017, with a $60 million Series A funding round with Atomico and Accel.
MessageBird Shows Growing Potentially
Often referred to as a European alternative to Twilio, MessageBird provides a cloud communications platform that supports video, voice, and text, wrapped up in an API environment. However, MessageBird describes itself as an Omnichannel Platform as a Service offering, enabling enterprises and companies of all sizes to support customers on any channel.
MessageBird ensures support for all kinds of messaging solutions, including WeChat, Messenger, WhatsApp, voice, email, and SMS, among other channels. MessageBird Founder, Robert Vis, believes that the future of interactions is omnichannel. The Series C funding emerged remotely during lockdown, and it arrives at a time when companies are searching for a messaging-first solution for customer communication across channels.
Robert Vis believes that this change comes from the COVID-19 trend of companies moving their customer service and sales solutions online, and into remote cloud environments. However, it’s also worth noting that this digitisation was already underway for most.
MessageBird says that a third of its 15,000 customers are now using its omnichannel cloud communications solutions, and the company is on track to reach 300 million euros in annual revenue. Customers of MessageBird include brands like Uber, Hugo Boss, Heineken, and many others.
What’s Next for MessageBird?
MessageBird notes that the new funding will be helping to triple the size of its global team, and expand the core markets the company already has in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Merger and Acquisition activity may be in the future too. One area that the company is focusing on going forward is the automation components of the Flow Builder software from MessageBird, which lets customer service agents automate a portion of queries via AI-powered chatbots.
Vis also noted when mentioning the latest funding round that the MessageBird brand is now a full work from anywhere company. He notes that in many areas, the option to work remotely at MessageBird has led to better work-life balance, and greater productivity.
