Your Work Messages Don't Belong in WhatsApp. BirdyChat Is Building an Alternative.

The graveyard of messaging apps is long, and the BirdyChat team knew exactly how long. For months in late 2024, that was the argument against building at all. Why dig another headstone? Then a single piece of EU regulation rewrote the math. In February 2025, they quit their jobs and started.

How It Started

It began with a complaint they kept hearing from people around them: "I know I shouldn't use personal chat apps for work, but I don't have an alternative."

It wasn't just a hunch. A LinkedIn poll the team ran put a number on it, 72% of respondents said they had some level of reservation about using personal apps for work. The gap was real, and it was specific. Slack and Teams solve internal communication well. But the conversations that happen outside the company with clients, partners, suppliers still end up scattered across personal chat apps, mixed in with family photos and grocery lists. That was the gap. It felt big enough, and painful enough, to build for.

Building From the Baltics

BirdyChat's team is split between Riga and Tallinn, and the founders are quick to credit the region for the strength of who they've been able to hire. There's a reason messaging feels native here: the Baltics have a deep history in social and communication products. Skype was built in Estonia. Draugiem.lv grew into one of the largest social networks in the region. That legacy hasn't faded as it's part of the local DNA.

The company's investor base tells a similar story about how the region operates. BirdyChat is backed by FirstPick (Lithuanian), Change Ventures (Latvian-Estonian), Tesonet (Lithuanian), and Estonian investor Markus Villig. Supporters from all three Baltic countries on a single early-stage round. "People here root for each other across borders," says co-founder Rolands Mesters. For a small company building something ambitious, that kind of cross-border tailwind is hard to overstate.

How It Works

BirdyChat is a chat app built specifically for work conversations, kept separate from your personal messaging. You sign up with your work email (no phone number required) and message anyone else by their work email. From there, you can organize chats into lists by project, client, or topic, keep discussions focused with message threads, and snooze or mark chats as done to stay on top of the noise.

In Europe, BirdyChat is interoperable with WhatsApp under the EU's Digital Markets Act so you can message WhatsApp contacts directly from BirdyChat without asking anyone to switch apps. Early users skew toward project managers, community builders, and business development professionals: people whose work is external communication. The problem that quietly disappears for them is the constant blur of work and personal life in one inbox. Work chats get a dedicated home. Personal apps stay personal.

Under the hood: BirdyChat went fully native with SwiftUI for iOS and macOS, Jetpack Compose for Android on a backend built in Elixir, a language designed for exactly this kind of real-time, concurrent messaging at scale. All data is hosted in Europe, which matters a great deal to the people they're building for.

The signal that it was landing came unprompted. Earlier this year, BirdyChat organically hit the front page of Hacker News and stayed there for a day; the thread now has over 500 comments. The takeaway for the team was clear, people care intensely about messaging, and there's a lot of ignored frustration in this space.

The Hard Part

Committing was not straightforward. Before going all-in, the founders spent real time debating whether they should even attempt this. They were clear-eyed about the messaging-app graveyard, and clear-eyed about the cold-start problem that has buried most of its occupants.

The thing that tipped the decision wasn't optimism, it was regulation. In late 2024, the team learned about the Digital Markets Act, the EU rule requiring major platforms like WhatsApp to open up to interoperability. Suddenly they wouldn't have to solve cold-start alone. They could build a work-focused chat app that plugs into where people already are. That was enough. They quit their jobs and started building.

Not every early call survived contact with reality. "For a while I thought we wouldn't need a web client," Mesters admits. "Of course that was wrong." The web client is now in active development, a small, honest reminder that conviction and correctness aren't the same thing.

What's Next

In the near term, the focus is the BirdyChat web client, so people can chat without downloading anything and an API that lets users connect BirdyChat to other productivity tools, including AI agents. A recently raised €1.7M round funds the runway to expand the product's capabilities and reach across more platforms.

The longer bet is bigger: a genuinely new category in messaging, built for communication with external business contacts. As Mesters puts it, the goal three years out is a world where "it feels obvious that high-value work conversations shouldn't happen on personal chat apps."

Recommendations

A couple of things on the founders' reading list right now:

Strength of the Few by James Islington
Sci-fi, described as Dune meets the Roman Empire. A recommendation from a good Estonian friend.

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb
Only halfway through, and already calling it the best business book they've read in the last five years.

🐥 How you can help: Everyone has a friend who's overwhelmed by work messages in their personal chat apps. If you do, tell them about BirdyChat @ birdy.chat.