Starting today, BirdyChat is available to professionals in the European Economic Area (EEA), the United Kingdom and Switzerland on iOS, Android, and macOS. You can download it here.
What is BirdyChat
BirdyChat is a chat app for work conversations. If you have used a personal chat app before, BirdyChat will feel familiar.
What makes BirdyChat different:
It's email first. Your work email is your username. No phone numbers needed to connect with someone. If you know their work email, you can message them.
It's tidy. Lists let you organize your chats by project, client, or topic. Message threads let you reply to a specific message without sending notifications to all group chat participants. Snooze chats or mark them as done to get to 'inbox zero'.
It’s connected. BirdyChat is interoperable with WhatsApp in Europe. If you are based in the EEA, you can message eligible WhatsApp contacts who have opted into third-party chats from BirdyChat.
Why we're building BirdyChat
Work is bleeding into personal chat apps. Some people are OK with this, but many of us feel it's not exactly right: our poll suggests 72% of people feel some level of reservation about using personal apps for work.
For individuals, using personal chat apps for work means it's harder to switch off from work — work messages can reach you at all times of the day. For companies, there's a hidden compliance burden as companies are liable for what their employees do on personal chat apps when those apps are used for work purposes.
We believe that work chats need a better place and we're building BirdyChat to become this place.
How people are using BirdyChat
For the last few months, we have been testing BirdyChat with an early user base and here are some of the use cases we've already seen:
Professionals use it to chat with their business contacts away from personal chat apps. Our European users love the ability to chat with their EU-based WhatsApp contacts without leaving BirdyChat.
Small teams use it to streamline day-to-day communication and to coordinate project work. Our users love the ability to organize chats and have fewer distractions than on other platforms.
Professional high-trust communities are forming on the platform. Our users love the fact that they can see everyone's real name and email to know exactly who they're chatting with. They also love using message threads to keep discussions organized.
As we open up, we're excited about the many use cases we have yet to discover.
What's next
We've closed a €1.7M round from UK and EU investors — DIG Ventures, Change Ventures, Ophelia Cai from Tiny VC, FIRSTPICK, Lumo Capital, Tesonet, Bolt co-founder Markus Villig, and tech investor Charlie Songhurst. This capital allows us to expand BirdyChat’s capabilities and availability across different platforms.
On the platform side, we're developing a web version of BirdyChat to let people chat without downloading an app. On the capabilities side, we're working on an API to let users connect BirdyChat with other productivity tools, including AI agents. All of this and more is coming in the next few months.
For the 50,000+ people who joined our waitlist — thank you. A lot of what you see in the app today came from your feedback and we're counting on you to keep telling us what to build next.
The future is productive, and we're excited to build it together with you.
Productively yours,
Rolands and Martins
Cofounders of BirdyChat