A platform for growth

Silvio Kutić, cofounder and CEO of full-stack communications platform Infobip, is familiar with failure. He can quickly rattle off a list of his early business ventures that flamed out—some of them spectacularly. But he doesn’t regard these entrepreneurial false starts as dead ends. 



In fact, Kutić thinks of them as stepping stones on a path crucial to today’s version of Infobip, which provides a broad array of capabilities at scale—from AI-enabled chatbots to customer engagement and security solutions—on a platform built for speed and deliverability. “If you’re a surgeon, failure isn’t a good thing,” Kutić says. “But if you want to build innovative things and disrupt industries, failure is an important part of the journey.”



An ambitious (and often wildly daring) approach to redefining omnichannel communications has helped the Croatia–based firm, a bootstrapped unicorn, build an A-list roster of clients—including Microsoft, Meta, and Uber—and net hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding. It’s also earned Infobip a spot on Fast Company ’s list of the world’s Most Innovative Companies of 2024. 



DEALING WITH GROWING PAINS



Since Infobip’s founding nearly 20 years ago, Kutić and the company’s leadership team have tried to steer clear of the tightly organized departments and complex org charts that can stifle creativity and have opted for a startup culture where experimentation and collaboration are key components.







But those plans were upset by an unlikely kind of problem: success. The company had doubled in size, with around 3,400 employees in more than 70 offices around the world. Even as he dealt with his company’s explosive growth, Kutić took steps to prevent a slow unraveling of the innovation-driven organizational approach the company had used to achieve success in the first place. “We started to become very hierarchical and process-driven,” he says. “So we had to transform the organization.”



And key to that effort was the creation of small, multidisciplinary teams organized not around processes but outcomes—whether fine-tuning a product or blue-sky dreaming about client solutions. “We’ve seen that this way is much better,” Kutić says. “People are more happy and engaged when they’re quickly innovating like a small startup, working together, and cheering victories together.”



PUTTING PEOPLE AND CUSTOMERS AT THE CENTER



The key to Infobip’s organizational—and cultural—transformation is its people. And an understanding that it’s not always the one who’s most qualified or most talented that’s the best fit for a team. “There are no shortcuts to choosing the right people,” Kutić says. “If we hire someone who’s really good for the position but not a good culture fit, it’s going to fail.” 



That fit is essential to hiring individuals who can flourish in an organization that prioritizes collaboration and have the curiosity to identify and adapt new tools and technologies. The primary focus of Infobip’s innovation-driven culture is understanding—and improving—their customer experiences and needs.



This cultural immersion might strike some as unnecessary. For Kutić, it gets to the heart of the company’s mission. “We created this platform for people to grow,” he says. “It’s all about enabling people and inspiring them to do more than they thought they could do before.”