BirdyChat, a workplace messaging app founded in Latvia, has raised €1.7M to accelerate its European expansion. Backed by early-stage European and Baltic investors including DIG Ventures, Change Ventures, and Tiny VC, BirdyChat has opened access to its waitlist of 50,000 users across Europe and the UK and is now available on iOS, Android, and macOS.
BirdyChat gives professionals a dedicated space for business messaging, separate from the personal chat apps they use with friends and family. The company offers an alternative for external professional communication, particularly for conversations with clients, partners, suppliers, and other contacts outside a company’s internal Slack or Microsoft Teams environment.
The app gained visibility last year for being the first to offer eligible users across Europe the option to message people on WhatsApp directly as part of the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). This enabled BirdyChat users to connect and chat with their professional contacts who use WhatsApp and have enabled third-party messaging in Europe – all without leaving the BirdyChat environment.
BirdyChat was co-founded by Rolands Mesters, one of Latvia’s more visible technology entrepreneurs, and Martins Spilners, a lifelong engineer with experience at FullContact and saas.group. For Mesters, BirdyChat marks a second company with European ambitions. His previous company, Nordigen, put Latvia and the wider Baltic ecosystem on the European open banking map before being acquired by GoCardless in 2022. In 2025, Mesters was named Founder of the Year at the Latvian Startup Awards, where BirdyChat was also recognized as Newcomer of the Year.
“Most of the messaging apps we use today are over a decade old. In the absence of alternatives, work has begun to creep into the personal chat apps we once reserved for friends and family. BirdyChat offers a dedicated alternative where work conversations can live.” – Rolands Mesters, co-founder of BirdyChat
The app addresses a common but often overlooked problem: while workplace apps such as Slack and Teams handle internal communication logistics, communicating with external partners or clients tends to happen on personal chat platforms. In a 2025 LinkedIn poll conducted by Mesters, 72% of respondents said they had some reservations about using personal apps for work.
“These apps were never built for work, and the result is a growing tension: professionals struggle to disconnect when work and personal messages share the same screen, while companies face compliance risks from employee conversations on personal channels,” said Mesters.
BirdyChat’s features are designed to make messaging more productive – threads to keep discussions organised around specific messages, lists to group chats by project or theme, and the use of work email addresses as usernames so people don’t need to share personal phone numbers.
“The 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.” – Rytis Vitkauskas, General Partner at DIG Ventures.
About BirdyChat
BirdyChat is a professional messaging app for people who want to keep work and personal communication separate. Founded by Rolands Mesters and Martins Spilners, the company is based in Riga, Latvia, and backed by €1.7M in funding from DIG Ventures, Change Ventures, Ophelia Cai from Tiny VC, FIRSTPICK, Lumo Capital, Tesonet, Bolt co-founder Markus Villig, and Charlie Songhurst.
