In our 5 minutes with profiles, MEF members talk about their business, their aspirations for the future and the wider mobile industry.
This week, Matija Ražem, Chief Commercial Telecom Officer talks about his business, a venerable 20 year old veteran of the industry and MEF Member of 10 years this October; Infobip.
What does Infobip do?
If you were to take a look at Infobip’s website, you’d see this description:
Infobip is the leading platform for conversational customer experiences. We use our expertise to partner with businesses and push the possibilities of communication.
But that doesn’t convey the depth of Infobip’s product stack and customer profiles, nor the degree to which innovation is ingrained in every product and service Infobip makes. From SMS services for MNOs, aggregators and enterprises, to cloud communications services, from SMS and voice firewalls to chatbots and AI innovation. Infobip is a key part of the global CPaaS and messaging security markets, and a trusted partner to some of the world’s biggest brands.
When did you launch and what growth have you seen?
Infobip will turn 20 next year. It began in a small town in Istria, Croatia as an idea of using SMS to bring closer the municipal government and its inhabitants. While this didn’t really work out, it was the germ of a business idea, which like any startup saw a seed investment and a period working out of a garage. Pretty standard by global standards, but quite unusual in Croatia at the time. Oh, and the seed investment came from the parents of Silvio Kutić, founder and CEO. Once the 2-man team of Silvio and Izabel Jelenić, the CTO, got a hold of a desk in a local startup incubator, the rest was easy.
So easy in fact that 20 years later, Infobip has 75 offices on all continents, two campus sites in Croatia, over 3500 employees and over 10,000 customers. Infobip’s platform processes 40 billion interactions monthly and is powered by 41 data centres, a huge network unrivalled in the CPaaS space.
What are your main goals?
Infobip is a business communications platform, and the main goal is to connect businesses with people over mobile. However, as the company expanded, so did the product portfolio and skill sets, allowing Infobip to also be a provider of anti-fraud and security messaging solutions to mobile operators.
In the latter space, our main goal is to nurture a sustainable messaging ecosystem, one that can bring numerous benefits to all participants in the value chain, down to the consumer.
In the end, it’s all about the consumer, the mobile user and their user experience and data security. In that sense, Infobip is a highly consumer-focused company, even if we’re a purely B2B operation.
Where do you see your company in three years’ time?
We’re currently putting a lot of effort into developing and integrating GenAI features into our entire product stack. In three years’ time this will be if not fully mature, then at least mature enough for a fully automated conversational messaging experience in B2C and C2B communications.
Infobip has been using AI and ML for anti-spam and anti-fraud messaging filters for years, so building on that experience we expect even more efficient fraud prevention capabilities. We also expect to be a publicly listed company, which should provide more funding for expansion in strategic verticals and key regions worldwide.
What aspect of mobile is most exciting to you right now?
The mobile industry is simmering right now. If all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place just right, a major shift in the mobile industry will happen. RCS coming into its own and powered by AI features, network APIs quietly changing the paradigm for exposing telco services, MNOs evolving from telcos to tech-cos – all of that promises a very interesting update to an ecosystem that has in the past been less than agile to new developments and fast-moving startups coming for their lunch. That is not the case here and now, and that’s a very exciting thing.
What’s the most critical issue that will hit mobile within the next 12 months?
AI has seen tremendous growth, and the hot topic right now is how to regulate it. Do we approach it with less oversight for unfettered innovation, or do we implement wide-reaching rules governing everything from personal data and copyright to accountability for content produced via AI? As usual the sweet spot should be somewhere in the middle, and this is not something that’s front and centre for the average user, but it’s something that large organisations such as MNOs need to take into account.
Apart from your own, which mobile companies are the ones to watch in the year ahead?
The CPaaS space is highly competitive and there are plenty of brilliant competitors from Europe, the US, India, and other regions of the world, highlighting the global nature of this business. Many new ones are popping up virtually every day, and it would be unfair to single out anyone, those who can recognise themselves in this will surely do so. Competition is good, it keeps us on our toes and drives us to be better and innovate more, and we have the utmost respect and appreciation for our peers in this space.
