The company’s services are used by almost everybody who has a mobile phone.
At the southern entrance to Vodnjan in Istria, on the road towards Galižana, there is a quite unusual building. It is different from other nearby structures as if someone had moved it from somewhere else, perhaps from the Silicon Valley, to a spot overlooking the Brioni Islands. This is the first Croatian business campus, reports Poslovni.hr on November 1, 2017.
The business complex is home to Infobip, a company with offices on all continents, in 54 world cities and 40 countries. Its services now reach up to four billion people, practically everyone who has a mobile phone, and it does not even have to be a smartphone. They deal in text messages, over seven billion of which are distributed each month through their infrastructure.
Silvio Kutić, Roberto Kutić and Izabel Jelenić are the founders of Infobip. And what do they do? It is likely that, if you are a user of Facebook or some other similar service, you have used the ability to double-confirm your identity, with a password and a text message. In that case, the system will ask you to enter a code which will arrive on your mobile device by a text message. And that message probably came through Infobip.
Another example: the Chocofood restaurant chain was having problems with a new online interface for ordering food because there was no way for customers to receive feedback on their order. The phone-lines were overwhelmed with customer inquiries whether the restaurant had received their orders, but that has now been replaced thanks to Infobip, and customers receive confirmation via a text message.
Instead of entering into individual agreements with some 800 operators worldwide, large businesses, such as social networks and banks, instead sign just a single agreement for such and many similar services – with Infobip.
Silvio Kutić graduated from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb. He says that he made the best decision in life when he did not return from a lunch break in a local public company where he used to work, but rather decided to develop his own ideas.
“At the end of 2001, I started working on the Virtual Municipality project, which was implemented at the end of 2002 in Vodnjan. Izabel joined me in 2003 – we used to develop software in my garage. When we founded Infobip in 2006, we were the only two employees. We had our first office at the entrepreneurial incubator in Pula. Roberto used to help us, and he officially started working in Infobip in 2009. Before that, he was the head of the technical department at Uljanik Strojogradnja,” says Silvio Kutić, who is now the CEO of Infobip. While working on the Virtual Municipality project, they realised that the text message channel had the most significant potential for business communication with the end users.
Translated from Poslovni.hr.
