The problem
Banks, hospitals, and government agencies needed to reach millions of customers, but every channel — SMS, voice calls, WhatsApp — meant a different vendor, a different integration, and a different bill, with no single view of the customer conversation.
How it works
Founded in 2006 by brothers Ahmed Hamdan and Hassan Hamdan and headquartered in Riyadh, Unifonic integrates customer communication channels including text, voice, messaging, and web into a single platform. Enterprises connect once via API or dashboard and send everything from online-banking OTP codes to WhatsApp vaccination requests, while Unifonic handles routing, delivery, and the underlying telecom infrastructure.
Pain points
Building and maintaining carrier relationships in-house is expensive; channel preferences shift constantly (SMS yesterday, WhatsApp today); and missed or delayed messages directly cost revenue and trust for banks and public services.
Business model
Cloud-communications platform economics: clients pay for the volumes they push through — SMS, voice minutes, WhatsApp sessions — plus engagement tooling, so revenue scales with the 10B+ transactions flowing across the network each year.
Challenges
Margins depend on carrier wholesale rates; Twilio-scale global players and regional telecom APIs compete for the same enterprise budgets; and the post-Series-B plan — expanding into Africa and Asia, partly through acquisitions — adds integration risk.
Funding
- Raised: $125M Series B (Sep 2021), led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Sanabil Investments — SoftBank’s first direct investment in a Saudi startup and the largest Saudi round closed at any stage at the time.
- Previously: bootstrapped until a $21M Series A led by STV (2018); the company says it quadrupled in size between the two rounds.
Latest — September 2021
On 15 September 2021 Unifonic announced the $125M Series B to fund product development, hiring, and expansion into new markets across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, including potential acquisitions.