Founders: Tony Jamous (CEO), Eric Nadalin
Date launched: 2010
Funding: $22.8 million
Industries disrupted: Mobile, Software, Telecom
Disrupting: Facebook (WhatsApp), Microsoft (Skype), Verizon
Competition: Layer, RebTel, Twilio
Source: Nexmo
Tony Jamous (left) and Eric Nadalin, co-founders of Nexmo
Nexmo—the name is short for "next + mobile"—is a cloud-based communication company that lets businesses reach customers through phone messages. With the rising demand for text-messaging applications, this 4-year-old company provides customers such as Airbnb, Expedia and Alibaba, to name a few, with the software tools that connect applications to wireless carriers and phones.
This is a boon for Nexmo's customers, since it eliminates the time and cost of working with individual networks to send out high-volume automated messages to their users.
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Nexmo makes money by taking a piece of the fee that's paid to carriers for network access. So far, the company is doing well with this strategy. Growth has been explosive. Founder and CEO Tony Jamous reported that Nexmo has 5 billion users in 200 countries across a network of 700 mobile operators. Its platform can handle more than 250 million messages a month.
From 2012 to 2013, Nexmo grew its revenue by more than 350 percent. The company—backed by such investors as Sorenson Capital and Intel Capital—reported revenue of $40 million last year, up from $8 million in 2012.
On the company's disruptive impact:
"Eighty percent of the world's leading messaging apps, the globe's top form of communication, rely on Nexmo to reach their users, including Line, Viber and WeChat."
