Bird cuts 20% of staff and shifts away from Europe as US customers take over
What's the deal? Bird, the Amsterdam-based business communications platform formerly known as MessageBird, is cutting approximately 20% of its workforce — with the majority of reductions in Europe.
Chief executive Robert VisDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →announced the decision in a note to staff published on LinkedIn, citing a fundamental shift in the company's customer base and the impact of AI on its operations. Bird generated approximately $250M in net revenue in 2025 and describes itself as profitable.
Founded in 2005, Bird provides a unified platform for businesses to communicate with customers via email, SMS, WhatsApp, and voice. Its customers include Meta, PayPal, and Uber.
The company raised $800M in a Series C extension in 2021 at a $3B valuation and rebranded from MessageBird to Bird in February 2024, simultaneously cutting 90 employees and slashing prices by 90% on SMS in an attempt to take on rivals including Twilio and Klaviyo. In February 2025, it cut a further 120 jobs — roughly one-third of its workforce at the time.
Why now? Vis was direct about the two drivers. The first is geography: 75% of Bird's revenue now comes from US-headquartered companies, including most of the Fortune 500, all of big tech, and many AI-native companies. Its engineering and operations teams were built for an Amsterdam-headquartered company whose customers are increasingly not in Europe.
The second is AI: tasks that required dedicated headcount even a few years ago no longer do. The company is continuing to hire in the US across go-to-market and engineering functions.
What could go wrong? This is Bird's third significant round of job cuts in roughly 18 months, raising questions about the stability of its organisational model and its ability to retain talent through repeated restructurings.
The pivot toward the US also means competing more directly with well-resourced American rivals on their home turf — a significant commercial challenge even for a profitable company.
Vis acknowledged in his note that building a global tech company from a European base has gotten harder over the past decade — a candid admission that where Bird was built is no longer where its business is growing.
The signal: Bird's restructuring is a microcosm of a broader tension playing out across European tech: companies founded and built in Europe increasingly finding that their customers, talent competition, and growth opportunities are concentrated in the US.
The decision reflects a commercial logic that many European founders privately acknowledge but rarely state as plainly as Vis has done here — that gravity in the global tech industry continues to pull toward the US
It is also a clear signal of how AI is reshaping headcount decisions at profitable, growing software companies — not just struggling ones.
Sources:
Robert Vis, LinkedIn
TechCrunch
Image credit:
Bird
J.V.
