January the 27th, 2024 – The influential and widely read Fortune has run a story on the truly incredible Croatian company Infobip, which grew from a loan given by parents to working with global giants like WhatsApp.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Mladen Miletic writes, Fortune, one of the most influential business publications in the entire world, recently published a large report on the Croatian company Infobip. Infobip has become a truly global cloud communication platform and the leading IT company in Croatia and the region. The subject of the reportage is how the first Croatian unicorn developed from a company opened in a small town in Croatia with only about 3,000 inhabitants into a technological giant worth more than a billion US dollars that now cooperates with names like WhatsApp and Uber.
Journalist Prarthana Prakash, the author of the piece published online, spoke with Silvio Kutić, the CEO and co-founder of Infobip, who as an electrical engineer in his student days toyed with the idea of creating a company that provides technology services. He tried several times to realise the project in order to found the company now known as Infobip back in 2006. Today, as the Fortune article points out, the Croatian company Infobip provides communication tools to some of the planet’s largest Internet companies.
“When an app asks you to agree to two-factor authentication to install it, or offers you a chatbot to talk to, it’s very likely that either Infobip or another company in the communications platform as a service (CPaaS) segment is behind it,” explains Prakash.
From the first day, the Croatian company Infobip has been a so-called bootstrapped unicorn or a fast-growing private company that has self-funded its development and become an established name with clients around the world. Fortune also does well to mention the fact that Infobip attracted an investment of 200 million dollars from the investment fund One Equity Partners (from New York), which made history and saw it become the first Croatian unicorn ever. In his interview with Fortune, Kutić shared several insights and lessons for business success.
Clarifying the first lesson for business success, he explained that the Croatian company Infobip succeeded only the third time, but that keeping on trying ultimately enriched the company.
“When you’re working on something, you have to fail the first three or four times.”
He also expressed satisfaction that Croatia can currently boast an extremely dynamic tech community, which has far from always been the case. The author stated that the well known electric vehicle manufacturing company Rimac Group became the second Croatian unicorn, while Google was sold Damir Sabol’s amazing app Photomath.
Attitude first, skills second…
The Fortune article stated that the key to the success of the Croatian company Infobip, an enterprise with approximately 3,400 employees in more than 70 countries around the world, lies in selecting the right talent. In order to form a strong team worth more than a billion dollars, Kutić sticks to one very simple motto:
“We’ve always focused on building the right culture and integrating the right people,” Kutić pointed out, adding that he’s always on the lookout for employees who “have the right attitude.”
He started Infobip back in his student days, so he had to learn everything else along the way, while the company grew and developed from a businesses with only a few employees to a company with several thousand of them.
“I started my internship as Infobip’s chief executive officer,” Kutić pointed out, adding that he had to figure out how to scale a company with a hundred employees as opposed to a company with a thousand employees, as well as how to help those same employees develop together with the company.
Infobip spent most of last year working on projects related to generative artificial intelligence – even before the trend around that very controversial type of technology took off.
In the Fortune story, Ivan Ostojić, a member of the Management Board for Business Development at Infobip, highlighted the company’s internal structure, which helps the company adapt to changes and make sure its employees remain alert and ready for anything in this increasingly fast-paced world.
“You know very well that tech advances extremely rapidly. We remain close not only to our clients, but also to our partners who actually innovate this technology,” Ostojić revealed.
“We have a policy of non-estrangement and are extremely close to our clients,” concluded Kutić.
