{"id":776200,"date":"2026-05-06T01:47:33","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T01:47:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/776200\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T01:47:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T01:47:33","slug":"founder-who-sold-his-last-startup-to-gocardless-raises-e1-7m-to-keep-work-chats-off-personal-phones-tfn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/776200\/","title":{"rendered":"Founder who sold his last startup to GoCardless raises \u20ac1.7M to keep work chats off personal phones \u2014 TFN"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rolands Mesters\u2019 last company, Nordigen, built an open banking API that connected to more than 2,000 European banks before it was acquired by GoCardless<\/a> in 2022. Terms were not disclosed to Tech Funding News.<\/p>\n

Now he is back with Martins Spilners<\/a> and a problem that has quietly irritated most working professionals for years: work conversations have taken over the personal messaging apps people once kept just for friends and family.<\/p>\n

Riga-based BirdyChat, founded in 2025, has raised \u20ac1.7 million to fix that. DIG Ventures<\/a> led the round, joined by Change Ventures, Tiny VC<\/a>, FIRSTPICK<\/a>, Lumo Capital, Tesonet<\/a>, Bolt co-founder Markus Villig<\/a>, and Charlie Songhurst<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Mesters raised it without a pitch deck. He initially spotted the gap during his time at Nordigen, watching his personal phone fill up with work messages from investors and partners. <\/p>\n

\u201cTelling the story about BirdyChat is not hard, because anyone can relate to communication being broken. Some parts work well. Some are totally broken,\u201d Mesters tells TFN. <\/p>\n

A 2025 LinkedIn poll Mesters ran found that 72% of respon<\/a>dents feel uncomfortable using personal apps for work, yet most do it anyway. Internal communication is largely solved: Slack and Microsoft Teams handle that. But reaching anyone outside your organisation still defaults to email or someone\u2019s personal WhatsApp. <\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are increasingly using personal chat apps for work-related discussions despite the compliance risks it creates for the companies they work for. BirdyChat is designed to solve that without changing how people communicate,\u201d Mesters says.<\/p>\n

Instead of using phone numbers, BirdyChat uses professional email addresses as usernames, so users do not have to share their personal contact details with clients. The app feels familiar, with threaded replies to organise group chats and lists to sort conversations by project or client. <\/p>\n

One big technical advantage comes from the EU\u2019s Digital Markets Act, which, since 2024, has required major platforms like WhatsApp to let third-party apps connect to their networks. BirdyChat was one of\u00a0the first to use this, allowing users to message WhatsApp contacts directly from their work identity rather than a personal number.<\/p>\n

The direct competitor is Slack Connect, but Mesters argues that the comparison flatters tools built for a different era. Most alternatives are at least a decade old, designed before AI became a genuine platform layer. BirdyChat is being built from scratch with AI productivity features central to the roadmap.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world does need another chat app, one that is purpose-built for external professional communication and with enterprise requirements at heart. Digital Markets Act created an additional tailwind for this need, we are thrilled to be backing Rolands and Martins,\u201d notes Rytis Vitkauskas<\/a>, general partner at DIG Ventures.<\/p>\n

BirdyChat\u2019s team of eight is currently all male. Mesters says the company plans to address that as it scales and expands hiring. The new capital will go toward building a web app, adding AI features, and opening the platform to the 50,000-person European waitlist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rolands Mesters\u2019 last company, Nordigen, built an open banking API that connected to more than 2,000 European banks…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":776201,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[691,64,607,440,1258,50,1595,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-776200","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-entrepreneurship","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-funding","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-startups","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116525115195247141","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/776201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}