From Vodnjan to a Global AI Platform

Infobip marks its twentieth anniversary at a point when its story is no longer defined only by revenue growth or geographic reach, but also by its ability to turn global communications infrastructure into a platform for the agentic AI era. Silvio Kutić and Izabel Jelenić describe the company’s development as a continuous cycle of learning, mistakes, reinvention and operational discipline. The next phase, they argue, will be shaped by AI not only as a product layer, but as a force changing internal processes, customer engagement and the way global enterprises work.

Infobip’s twentieth anniversary is more than a milestone for a Croatian technology company. It is a rare example of a business that started in Vodnjan, built its own global communications infrastructure and reached a point where its next stage of growth is increasingly tied to artificial intelligence. Speaking in Vodnjan during the anniversary programme, CEO Silvio Kutić and CTO Izabel Jelenić reflected on the company’s origins, its mistakes, culture, US expansion, AgentOS and the next transformation in communication between businesses and their customers.

Kutić does not present Infobip’s development as a simple success story. He repeatedly stresses that the company’s current position was built gradually. “We did it step by step. It did not happen all at once,” he says. That is why an anniversary matters: it creates space to look back, compare the early days with today’s scale, and reconnect with the employees, partners, and clients who helped shape the company.

For the anniversary, Infobip gathered partners and clients from 35 countries in Vodnjan, while the conversation also referred to a broader range of markets and guests connected with the company. Kutić says Infobip now operates globally, with the exception of sanctioned markets where it cannot do business. Such reach was not automatic. In the early years, opening doors at large organisations, especially telecom operators, required focus and persistence. “We had to be very focused in choosing the type of client and work very hard just to open those doors,” he says.

One of Infobip’s defining advantages remains its infrastructure. Kutić refers to more than 850 operator connections, while Jelenić describes the system as a communications backbone that cannot be replicated quickly. “You cannot simply tell the cloud: give me offices and data centres around the world,” Jelenić says. Building that kind of network takes years, local presence, regulatory understanding and operational control from platform to network.

The original technological ambition, according to Jelenić, was to build an IT company in which software creates real value. “What attracted me was the idea that we could build software that creates services and value for people,” he says. Infobip built much of its core technology in-house because, in the early stages, some of the necessary solutions simply did not exist as products that could be bought. Where something was core to the business, the company tried to build it. Where it was not, it bought readily available tools.

That decision increased risk, but it also created flexibility. Jelenić says the company could adapt its software to new customer segments, geographies and services precisely because much of the system was developed internally. “We started many things from scratch, we learned, and that allowed us to adapt,” he says. That ability to adjust has mattered more than any single turning point. Asked which moment most defined Infobip, Jelenić rejects the idea of one decisive event. “There is no one thing. You have to keep repeating it,” he says.

That repeated cycle of innovation, failure, and correction is one of the central themes of the conversation. Kutić openly says that most attempts do not succeed, but that the important thing is to test hypotheses quickly and learn. “Even today, we miss more often than we succeed, but now and then we manage to do something,” he says. Behind that approach was a bootstrap model. In Croatia’s early technology market, venture capital and private equity were not readily available, while Infobip was profitable and growing quickly. “It took us only six years to reach 100 million dollars in revenue,” Kutić says.

External capital became important when the company needed a stronger entry into the US market. The acquisition of OpenMarket, worth approximately 300 million dollars, marked one of the most demanding phases in Infobip’s development. Jelenić describes it as the company’s first major American acquisition, completed during COVID, across a nine-hour time difference and with a great deal of learning in real time. “We accepted that we would not do everything perfectly,” he says, adding that the deal ultimately opened the way for further expansion in the United States.

The Americas are now Infobip’s largest revenue pillar. In the conversation, Kutić refers to roughly 51 to 53 percent of revenue being linked to the Americas, explaining that the US technology market is large, investment-heavy and central to the platforms that define the global digital ecosystem. In 2025, Infobip recorded revenue growth of around 17 to 17.5 percent, while Kutić said growth in 2026 is currently around 20 percent, with the year still unfinished.

The financial shift matters because it shows a move into a more profitable phase. According to previously published figures, Infobip reached 2.34 billion dollars in revenue in 2025, with adjusted EBITDA of 200.6 million dollars and operating cash flow of 144.4 million dollars, while recording the Group’s first net profit. Kutić explains that the company has undergone a major internal transformation in recent years, reducing functional silos and organising around multidisciplinary teams with clearer ownership of results.

That transformation is not only structural. It is cultural. Infobip now has around 3,600 employees, a level that has remained stable for the past three years, and more than 70 nationalities across its offices worldwide. Kutić argues that knowledge becomes obsolete quickly, while behaviour, decision-making and the ability to learn remain decisive. “Culture was the most important thing for us, and it still is,” he says. People inside the company, he adds, move not only vertically but also horizontally, across roles and multidisciplinary teams.

In the technological phase now unfolding, artificial intelligence has become a central theme. Jelenić recalls that Infobip was already working on chatbots and NLP-based solutions in 2016 and 2017, but that the commercial arrival of generative AI changed expectations. “You can now do many things by explaining them, instead of learning where to click,” he says. Companies, he warns, should not look at AI only as a capability shown to customers, but as a deep internal change in processes, communication and roles.

AgentOS is therefore a logical continuation of Infobip’s evolution. The platform is designed to bring communication channels, customer data, automation and AI agents into a single layer for managing customer experience. In that model, companies are no longer buying only a channel. They are looking for a partner able to connect communication, data, security and automation. Jelenić warns that infrastructure remains an advantage, but not a guarantee. “We must not become comfortable with it, because the services above that infrastructure have to be developed as fast as, or faster than, everyone else,” he says.

For Infobip, the next chapter is therefore not only about products, but also about how the company works. Kutić admits that he likes pushing the organisation to move faster. “However much we do, we are always slow,” he says. That sentence captures the logic of a company that entered the global technology arena from Vodnjan but does not treat its current position as the end of the story. Twenty years after its founding, the company is again focused on infrastructure and services for a communications environment in which AI agents will play an increasingly important role.