Messaging Firm Bird Raises $450 Million in JPMorgan-Backed Debt

Customer messaging company Bird.com has raised $450 million of debt financing led by JPMorgan Chase & Co., as it seeks to return cash to investors and employees.

The debt comprises a $400 million term loan and a $50 million revolving credit facility, with other backers including Capital One Financial Corp. and Citigroup Inc., Bird said in a statement Wednesday. The money will be used to pay a dividend to existing shareholders and current and former employees, according to Chief Executive Officer Robert Vis.

The mechanism returns money to investors and employees without requiring them to sell down their stakes through a secondary share sale, Vis said in an interview. “My shareholders didn’t want to sell shares to anyone, but they have LPs who want some liquidity,” Vis said.

Vis didn’t disclose the company’s valuation. The company, previously known as MessageBird, was valued at $3.8 billion when it raised funds in 2021, Business Insider reported at the time.

Bird, formed in 2011, lets businesses send marketing texts, WhatsApp messages and emails and competes with Twilio Inc. It’s part of a growing group of established tech companies that opt to raise money and stay private, rather than face the regulatory burden and investor scrutiny of going public. Two prominent examples are Stripe and Databricks.

Vis described the company as “IPO-ready” in 2020. Now he says there’s no need for the New York- and Amsterdam-based company to list.

“Maybe if we needed $2 billion to go do something very exciting, then I think a public company makes more sense,” he said. “But for now, I think we’re happy to be a private company.”

Bird recently cut its headcount by 20% to about 120, with most of the redundancies in Europe. At its peak, Bird had nearly a thousand employees. “I think the first layoffs were tied to over-hiring,” Vis said. Since then, “Bird got more efficient and we got more done,” he added.

The company’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization was $165 million last year, and it generates around 70% of the revenue from the US, according to Vis.