Infobip said Thursday that its Startup Tribe programme has supported thousands of startups and scaleups from more than 120 countries in its first five years — a milestone the cloud communications company is folding neatly into its own 20th-anniversary victory lap.
The programme, launched in May 2021, hands qualifying companies up to $60,000 in credits against Infobip’s services: SMS, WhatsApp messaging, transactional email, OTP verification, contact-centre tooling. Members also get introductions to Infobip’s network of advisors, investors and accelerators. Joining costs nothing.
The reason this lands is that communications infrastructure is a quiet tax on every early-stage product. An app that needs one-time passcodes, receipt emails and a WhatsApp channel is looking at either months of engineering or a per-message bill that scales faster than revenue does. Infobip’s pitch is to delete that line item during the years a startup can least afford it — and, not incidentally, to make its own platform the default once the credits run dry.
“The generous credit programme has allowed us to reallocate significant resources from infrastructure costs directly into sales and marketing, which is often the biggest challenge for growing startups,” said Ilija Milovic, co-founder and CTO of HotelSync, a cloud property management platform and Startup Tribe member.
The credits math
Infobip says it has “delivered millions in value through products and services” to members over five years. That is the sort of number that sounds large and explains nothing. The company has not disclosed how many of those thousands of startups converted into paying customers, what share of the $60,000 ceiling members typically draw down, or how many are still on the platform a year after graduating.
None of which makes the programme a bad deal. Credits-for-lock-in is the oldest play in developer infrastructure — AWS Activate, Stripe’s startup programmes and Twilio’s various credit schemes all run the same arithmetic — and founders generally understand the trade. The switching cost only bites later, once messaging is threaded through every workflow in the product.
“As we celebrate Infobip’s 20th anniversary, our goal is to help the startups and scaleups we support to reach two decades in business,” said Lucija Reic, Startup Ecosystem Team Lead at Infobip.
Founded in 2006 by Silvio Kutic and Izabel Jelenic, Infobip has grown into one of the larger CPaaS players outside the US, claiming reach to more than seven billion mobile devices through 10,000-plus connections, 800 of them direct operator links. The company has spent the past two years repositioning as “AI-first,” pushing agentic customer-service tooling alongside its messaging rails. A pipeline of thousands of AI-native startups building on that platform is, from Infobip’s side, considerably more valuable than the credits it costs to attract them.
Applications for Startup Tribe remain open, and remain free.
