Twilio’s Dutch Rival MessageBird Plans an IPO in ‘Gold Rush’
- Startup is nearly 10 years old and growing 50% year-on-year
- CEO Vis started MessageBird after selling Zaypay in 2011
Disgruntled customers don’t sit on hold anymore. They text and Zoom and Whatsapp and web chat and email, and they don’t want to wait 72 hours for a response. For MessageBird, the Dutch software company that helps clients make sense of the deluge, that’s meant a surge in sales and plans for an initial public offering.
Robert Vis, MessageBird’s 36-year-old founder and chief executive officer, said there’s been a fundamental shift in the enterprise communications industry, away from the calls and emails that made up customer inquiries in the past to a proliferation of apps. It’s been driven by on-demand digital businesses, such as Uber Technologies Inc. and Airbnb Inc., and the growth of cloud-based tools such as those from Slack Inc. MessageBird is on track to grow by 50% to about 300 million euros ($337 million) this year, he said.