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Sent raises $12M Series A to supercharge AI messaging infrastructure

An oversubscribed $12 million round led by Companyon Ventures, as Sent moves from software vendor to licensed telecom infrastructure.

Sent announces its $12M Series A, led by Companyon Ventures with participation by Urban Innovation Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners, bulletpitch and CP Overture
  • Sent intelligently routes messages across WhatsApp, SMS and RCS based on a user's preferred channel
  • The platform enables enterprises to thrive in the agentic messaging era as AI agents take over a growing share of Business to Consumer communication
  • Sent enables customers to reach 1 billion unique phone numbers through direct relationships with 75+ carriers
  • Returning investors include Companyon Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Urban Innovation Fund (UIF) and CP Overture

NEW YORK, July 28, 2026 — Sent, the unified API that lets companies reach any user over SMS, WhatsApp or RCS through a single integration, today announced an oversubscribed $12 million Series A. The round was led by Companyon Ventures with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, UIF and CP Overture, among others. Companyon, Bessemer and UIF all invested in Sent's earlier rounds and are now tripling down as the company moves from software vendor to licensed telecom infrastructure. Angel investors from Clay, Eleven Labs and Attentive invested at the pre-seed stage.

The global A2P messaging market is worth approximately $100 billion and dominated by legacy vendors like Twilio, Sinch and Infobip. These incumbents are unprepared for the wave of agentic messaging that will soon see AI agents sending more messages than humans.

Enter Sent: modern messaging infrastructure built for AI-native products.

Built by developers who lived the problem

Sent's co-founders, Daniel Vataj and Betim Drenica, spent years building software that depended on messaging and kept hitting the same walls every developer knows. Verification codes that silently failed. A separate integration, compliance regime and vendor contract for every channel. Deliverability problems no dashboard could explain, let alone fix.

The frustration turned personal when Daniel was locked out of his own bank account while travelling internationally after a one-time verification code sent by SMS never arrived. The fix was obvious: the message should have fallen back to WhatsApp, but it never did. Betim had experienced similar issues.

Rather than treat that as an isolated failure, they set out to rebuild messaging deliverability at the infrastructure level.

The problem, they concluded, was the infrastructure underneath, not the tooling on top. So they founded Sent to rebuild it, building an AI model that determines two things in real time: what's available (which platforms can actually receive a message to this number) and what's optimal (if the number is reachable on WhatsApp, SMS, and RCS, send to the one they actually use).

“AI agents will soon send more business messages than people do, and the infrastructure beneath them is not ready. The legacy model asks every company to choose a single channel, integrate and continuously manage it, and hope messages arrive. Sent reverses that model: tell us who you need to reach, and our platform determines where they are reachable, routes the message through the right channel, and handles the compliance and carrier complexity underneath it. We're building the communications layer for a world in which AI initiates billions of customer conversations.”

Daniel Vataj, co-founder and CEO of Sent

“The next generation of messaging infrastructure has to make complexity disappear without sacrificing control. Routing, reliability and compliance need to work together at the infrastructure layer, so developers can integrate once and trust that every message and notification delivers. That is the company we set out to build.”

Betim Drenica, co-founder and CTO

Sent at a glance

  • One API for SMS, WhatsApp and RCS, with every message automatically routed to the channel most likely to deliver it
  • More than 1 billion unique phone numbers reachable with mapped channel preferences through direct relationships with 75+ carriers
  • More than 20,000 developers and product teams routing traffic through the platform
  • 99.9% uptime, with routing decisions made in real time and end-to-end delivery typically under 200ms
  • Customers cut messaging costs 70-80% versus SMS-only approaches
  • Compliance built in: automated opt-in enforcement, country-specific rules, content validation and global compliance registration
  • Licensed and approved by the FCC as a U.S. telecom carrier; SOC 2 Type 2 compliant

Legacy infrastructure, rebuilt for a channel-native world

Legacy providers like Twilio, MessageBird and Sinch were built around SMS as the default channel, an assumption that no longer holds. Only 13% of consumers now use SMS as their primary messaging channel, yet brands still spend an average of $0.11 per message reaching customers through it, and every new channel means a separate integration, a separate compliance regime and a separate campaign to rebuild.

Sent's API abstracts all of it: write once, and the platform automatically routes each message to the channel most likely to reach that specific recipient, handling content formatting, carrier relationships and compliance (including TCR and 10DLC) behind the scenes.

Investor perspectives

“Daniel and Betim are solving a problem we know intimately: global messaging deliverability is broken, and nobody building for developers has fixed it. This thesis has only strengthened since we first invested in them. Sent has since gone from creating a better API to licensed telecom infrastructure, and its FCC designation puts real distance between it and the incumbents. We're leading this round for the same reason we led the first: this is the team, and the company, that owns the category.”

Andrew Berg, Partner at Companyon Ventures, which has led every round in Sent's history to date

“Sent's growth reflects real product-market fit, not sentiment. A billion phone numbers and more than 20,000 developers and product teams routing traffic through Sent tell you enterprises are switching because Sent solves a problem that costs them real money. We backed Daniel at seed, and we're doubling down here.”

Andrew Felbinger, Partner at UIF, which invested in Sent's seed round and is investing again in this round

“Daniel, Betim and their team have created the orchestration layer to power the next generation of business communications. As AI agents dramatically increase messaging volumes, Sent is building the carrier-grade infrastructure that makes messaging reliable, cost-efficient, and developer friendly.”

Kent Bennett, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, which invested in Sent's seed round and is investing again in this round

Proof in production

Companies including TrimRX, ITM Studio and ITNIO Tech have moved off Twilio and onto Sent.

“Sent is one of those rare developer tools that feels dramatically simpler than everything else in the category. We were able to get messaging working in just a few lines of code, and the platform abstracts away the complexity of SMS, RCS and WhatsApp routing so developers can focus on building their products instead of messaging infrastructure.”

Sonny Sangha, Founder and CEO of Zero to Full Stack Hero

From software vendor to regulated infrastructure

Sent recently became a licensed telecom carrier in the United States, a designation that moves the company from a vendor sitting on top of existing carrier infrastructure to a direct participant in it, with the ability to allocate numbers directly and regulatory and technical parity with incumbents.

Sent's team draws the comparison to Stripe's evolution from a checkout widget into a payments processor, or Plaid's move from developer tool to regulated financial infrastructure: the moment a company stops being a better interface and becomes the system of record underneath it.

That shift matters most for AI. As software agents increasingly initiate customer conversations (sending confirmations, resolving support issues, closing transactions), messaging is becoming two-way, persistent and agent-driven rather than a one-off notification. Sent's platform is built for that world: a durable user identity that persists across sessions and channels, MCP-compatible tooling for agent developers, and rate-aware delivery designed to keep automated workflows from breaking under load.

Use of funds

The Series A will fund continued expansion of Sent's direct carrier network, deepen its AI-native, agent-facing messaging infrastructure, and grow its engineering, compliance and enterprise go-to-market teams as the company moves further upmarket.

About Sent

Sent is the unified messaging API for modern software companies, letting them reach any user over SMS, WhatsApp or RCS through a single integration. Sent's platform automatically routes every message to the channel most likely to deliver it, manages compliance across 75-plus carrier integrations globally, and reaches more than 1 billion phone numbers with mapped channel preferences. Sent is a licensed telecom carrier in the United States and is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant. The company is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Companyon Ventures and Urban Innovation Fund (UIF). Learn more at sent.dm.

Contacts

Media contact: Steel Comms for Sent, ant@steelcomms.co

Investor contact: Daniel Vataj, co-founder and CEO, investors@sent.dm

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