BirdyChat raises €1.7M to separate work and personal messaging

What's the deal? Rolands Mesters, who previously co-founded open banking startup NordigenDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and sold it to GoCardless in 2022, has raised €1.7M in pre-seed funding for his new venture BirdyChatDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. The Riga-based startup is building a messaging app that lets businesses communicate with customers through a dedicated channel — keeping work conversations off personal phones and apps like WhatsApp or iMessage.

The round was led by Dig VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, with participation from several angel investors.

Why now? The line between work and personal messaging has blurred beyond recognition. Millions of small businesses rely on WhatsApp, Telegram, or SMS to talk to customers, but those conversations get buried in personal chats, missed, or lost when an employee leaves. BirdyChat aims to give businesses a professional messaging layer without forcing customers to download yet another app.

Mesters has argued that existing solutions like Slack or Microsoft Teams are designed for internal communication, not customer-facing conversations. BirdyChat targets the gap between heavyweight enterprise tools and the informal messiness of personal chat apps.

What could go wrong? The messaging space is brutally competitive. WhatsApp Business already serves millions of small businesses, and Meta continues to invest heavily in its commercial messaging features. Convincing customers to adopt a new communication channel — even a lightweight one — is a steep ask when incumbents are free and ubiquitous.

There's also the classic chicken-and-egg problem: businesses need customers on the platform, and customers need a reason to be there.

The signal: BirdyChat's framing as a "cross-company professional collaboration" tool, per Dealroom, suggests ambitions beyond simple customer messaging — potentially targeting the broader B2B communication layer between organisations. Dig Ventures' backing of a repeat founder whose previous company, Nordigen, reached early growth before being acquired by the late-growth GoCardless fits a familiar Baltic playbook: build focused infrastructure, prove traction, then exit to a larger platform player.

Read more: Tech Funding News