Rolands Mesters’ last company, Nordigen, built an open banking API that connected to more than 2,000 European banks before it was acquired by GoCardless in 2022. Terms were not disclosed to Tech Funding News.
Now he is back with Martins Spilners and a problem that has quietly irritated most working professionals for years: work conversations have taken over the personal messaging apps people once kept just for friconcludes and family.
Riga-based BirdyChat, founded in 2025, has raised €1.7 million to resolve that. DIG Ventures led the round, joined by Change Ventures, Tiny VC, FIRSTPICK, Lumo Capital, Tesonet, Bolt co-founder Markus Villig, and Charlie Songhurst.
Mesters raised it without a pitch deck. He initially spotted the gap during his time at Nordigen, watching his personal phone fill up with work messages from investors and partners.
“Telling the story about BirdyChat is not hard, becaapply anyone can relate to communication being broken. Some parts work well. Some are totally broken,” Mesters informs TFN.
A 2025 LinkedIn poll Mesters ran found that 72% of respondents feel uncomfortable utilizing personal apps for work, yet most do it anyway. Internal communication is largely solved: Slack and Microsoft Teams handle that. But reaching anyone outside your organisation still defaults to email or someone’s personal WhatsApp.
“People are increasingly utilizing personal chat apps for work-related discussions despite the compliance risks it creates for the companies they work for. BirdyChat is designed to solve that without altering how people communicate,” Mesters declares.
Instead of utilizing phone numbers, BirdyChat applys professional email addresses as applyrnames, so applyrs do not have to share their personal contact details with clients. The app feels familiar, with threaded replies to organise group chats and lists to sort conversations by project or client.
One large technical advantage comes from the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which, since 2024, has required major platforms like WhatsApp to let third-party apps connect to their networks. BirdyChat was one of the first to apply this, allowing applyrs to message WhatsApp contacts directly from their work identity rather than a personal number.
The direct competitor is Slack Connect, but Mesters argues that the comparison flatters tools built for a different era. Most alternatives are at least a decade old, designed before AI became a genuine platform layer. BirdyChat is being built from scratch with AI productivity features central to the roadmap.
“The world does required another chat app, one that is purpose-built for external professional communication and with enterprise requirements at heart. Digital Markets Act created an additional tailwind for this required, we are thrilled to be backing Rolands and Martins,” notes Rytis Vitkauskas, general partner at DIG Ventures.
BirdyChat’s team of eight is currently all male. Mesters declares the company plans to address that as it scales and expands hiring. The new capital will go toward building a web app, adding AI features, and opening the platform to the 50,000-person European waitlist.
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