Communications platform MessageBird raises first funding round of $60 million

Cloud communications platform MessageBird has raised $60 million in a Series A round led by Accel with participation from Atomico and Y Combinator.

The Amsterdam-based MessageBird, a rival of Twilio, provides a platform for companies to send and receive voice and text messages through its APIs. The company recently launched its new Voice API product.

“We’ve always focused on building the direct relationship with the carrier. That has always been the key focus and the most important because the carrier owns the subscriber at the end of the day,” said Robert Vis, CEO.

MessageBird has been bootstrapped for six years but profitable, he added, with the company reinvesting all profits back into its teams. This is its first funding round from institutional investors.

“We wanted to work with investors in Silicon Valley and their network to help us grow the business. The money will be specifically used for expanding our teams in the US, Asia and our European team in Amsterdam,” said Vis.

“Communications is such a large space,” he continued. “If you want to continuously capture large parts of that market, you just really have to invest in the teams and the investment helps us do that at a much quicker pace than we would have done with a bootstrapped mentality.”

The Series A round will be used to grow its team while it will consider acquisitions in Europe, the US, and Asia.

“It can be small acqui-hires or it could just basically be messaging and voice companies that have been around for a while,” said Vis.

“For us, we wouldn’t really be buying technology, we’d primarily be buying customers or teams.”

As part of the investment, Miles Clements, partner at Accel, and Hiro Tamura, partner at Atomico, have joined the board of directors.