Every early-stage company runs into the same unglamorous problem sooner or later. The moment a product needs to send a receipt, verify a phone number, or message a customer on WhatsApp, a founder is suddenly an infrastructure buyer, whether they meant to be one or not. That work rarely shows up on a pitch deck, yet it can eat months of engineering time or a bill that scales faster than revenue does.

[For more news, click here]

Infobip, the Croatian-born cloud communications company celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, built a program five years ago to make that problem disappear for as many founders as it could reach, and the results are now large enough to say something about how the company sees its own future.

The Hidden Tax on Every New App

Infobip launched its Startup Tribe Programme in May 2021 with a simple premise: mission-driven startups and scaleups need to build and manage customer communications, but almost none of them should have to build that infrastructure from scratch. The program offers up to $60,000 in credits toward Infobip's services, along with introductions to a global network of advisors, investors and accelerators. In its first five years, the company says it has supported thousands of startups and scaleups from more than 120 countries and delivered millions of dollars in product and service value to members. Joining costs nothing.

A Program Built Around One Idea

The logic behind the program is straightforward once you see it from a founder's chair. Building reliable transactional email, secure one-time-passcode verification and a WhatsApp channel from the ground up is either months of engineering work or a per-message bill that climbs faster than a young company's revenue can keep up with. By absorbing that cost during the years a startup can least afford it, Infobip removes what amounts to a quiet tax on every early-stage product, freeing founders to spend their limited runway on the parts of the business only they can build. The credits cover the company's messaging, voice, email and contact-center tools, and members also gain access to Infobip's roster of more than 150 venture capital partners, a detail that turns the program into something closer to an entry point for fundraising conversations than a simple discount.

What Five Years of Free Credits Adds Up To

The numbers Infobip has released paint a picture of a program that has scaled well beyond a marketing gesture. Thousands of startups across more than 120 countries have joined since the May 2021 launch, and the company says it has delivered millions in value through its products and services to members over that period. In the United Kingdom alone, participating startups and scaleups have received the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of pounds in credits, evidence that the program's reach extends well beyond any single market. Infobip has also gone further than credits in select cases. The company made a direct strategic investment in the Croatian ed-tech startup STEMI alongside Photomath founder Damir Sabol, and it runs a separate startup incubator, Scale 2.0, that has helped launch companies such as CircuitMess and Airt.ai.

Two Founders, Two Industries, One Common Problem

The value of the program is easiest to see through the founders who have used it. Ilija Milovic, Co-Founder and CTO at the cloud property management system HotelSync, credits the program with changing how his company allocates its budget. “HotelSync is proud to be a rapidly growing hospitality tech provider, and Infobip’s Startup Tribe programme has played a key role in supporting our scaling journey. Being part of Infobip Startup Tribe has been a gamechanger for HotelSync.

Infobip’s platform has been instrumental in automatizing and optimizing essential workflows, from reliable transactional emails and secure OTP verifications to leveraging advanced tools like WhatsApp. Crucially, the generous credit programme has allowed us to reallocate significant resources from infrastructure costs directly into sales and marketing, which is often the biggest challenge for growing startups. Beyond the programme, we are committed Infobip users because of the platform’s exceptional stability and amazing support,” Milovic said.

Gloria Oppong, Co-Founder and CEO at the cleaning services marketplace Cleanster, described a similar shift in what her team was able to prioritize.

“Infobip’s Startup Tribe programme gave us the support and credits we needed to accelerate our growth. The service has been amazing, and the platform does exactly what it is supposed to do, enabling our team to integrate quickly and ensure reliable communication with our users. Having a partner that provides stable infrastructure and responsive support has helped us focus on scaling Cleanster and delivering a better experience for both cleaners and customers,” Oppong said.

Both founders describe the same underlying trade, less time spent negotiating vendor contracts and patching together messaging tools, more time spent on the product and customers that actually define whether a startup survives.

Why Gulf Founders Should Take Note

The timing is notable for founders outside Infobip's traditional European base, particularly across the Gulf. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have spent the past two years building some of the fastest-growing startup ecosystems in the world, backed by sovereign capital and a wave of venture debt that let regional companies skip financing stages that took Western markets decades to reach. Infobip has matched that growth with its own regional buildout, opening data centers in Riyadh, Doha and Dubai to keep customer data local and support Arabic-language, AI-driven customer engagement for banks and government services across the region. For a Gulf founder building a fintech or logistics startup today, a program that removes communications infrastructure costs during the earliest, most fragile stage of the business, while also connecting them to global investors and accelerators, lines up closely with how the region's own venture ecosystem is already trying to compress the distance between an idea and a scaled company.

Two Decades In, Still Building for the Next Generation

Lucija Reić, Startup Ecosystem Team Lead at Infobip, frames the milestone as a continuation of a promise rather than a victory lap. “In its first five years, our Startup Tribe Programme has helped new and ambitious firms achieve their business objectives and scale up through the engagement and reach offered by our global communications platform. As we celebrate Infobip’s 20th anniversary, our goal is to help the startups and scaleups we support to reach two decades in business with access to our market-leading services and global network of world-class investors, funds, and accelerators,” Reić said.

That framing matters. A company marking its own 20th anniversary is, in effect, betting that the founders it supports today will still be building a decade or two from now, and that the credits it hands out during a startup's hardest years are the kind of early support that compounds. Startups and scaleups interested in joining the Startup Tribe programme can apply at no cost, gaining access to Infobip's communication infrastructure, technical support and mentorship as part of the initiative.

Related Articles:

How the Gulf Skipped a Financing Stage That Took Western Startups Decades to Reach

Google Launches Second AI Accelerator for MENA-T Startups

Exclusive: CyberME Studio Strengthens Saudi Startup Ecosystem With Venture Building