San Francisco – Gigs, the world’s first telecom-as-a-service platform that enables companies to offer phone and data plans through an easy to use API, today announced that it has raised a $20MM Series A led by Gradient, Google’s early-stage fund, with participation from YC Continuity, Crane Venture Partners, Speedinvest, BoxGroup, Dara Khosrowshahi (CEO of Uber), Tony Xu (Co-founder & CEO of DoorDash), Fidji Simo (CEO of Instacart), Hanno Renner (Co-founder & CEO of Personio), Max Tayenthal (Co-Founder & Co-CEO of N26) and many others. With this funding, Gigs will scale its team to meet rapidly growing demand and refine its technical infrastructure to build the gateway between telecoms and technology enabled businesses of this world.

Gigs is building a platform to enable any business to offer eSIM & SIM enabled phone plans of any size on any network globally. Businesses can launch their own mobile service and monetize their audience, unlocking recurring revenue streams, while having full control over brand and pricing. From neobanks providing branded phone plans alongside their credit or debit cards, to employee management platforms enabling their customers to issue phone plans to employees in just a few clicks, to hardware OEMs offering subscriptions bundled with their devices, Gigs has seen growing demand from technology enabled businesses in different industries.

Hermann Frank, co-founder and CEO at Gigs said: “Gigs is creating the telecom-as-a-service category. We are the first ones to do what Stripe did for payments or AWS did for hosting: Enabling businesses to embed phone and data plans into their products and sell to their customers globally. So far only IoT and travel data have seen a limited form of innovation. We saw the need to provide any company from any industry with full frictionless access to networks incl. 5G, Voice & SMS in order to innovate and launch new connectivity products and open up new revenue streams. That is why we have reduced the complexity of running your own global operator down to 5 API calls. With our hosted checkout it is even as simple as embedding a link into your product. No code required.”

Dennis Bauer, co-founder and President at Gigs adds: “Telecom operators have failed to make their services easily available to technology enabled businesses and remain a closed system. We are pursuing a once in a decade opportunity to modernize an industry that has to date failed to adapt to the needs of modern, technology enabled platforms. Before Gigs, companies interested in offering phone plans would have to spend months negotiating contracts with telecom providers, committing millions of $ in spend, integrating with their networks, and building software to offer and manage subscriptions to their users. This barrier proved insurmountable for most businesses, stifling innovation at a moment when connectivity is more important than ever. With Gigs, companies will be able offer phone plans in any market they operate in, all through the same integration.”

“Gigs is a true category creator that fundamentally changes the dynamics in the telecommunications space,” said Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient. “By allowing businesses to integrate with operator services within days and opening up technology platforms to operators as new channels to sell through, Gigs is unlocking the next wave of innovation in connectivity. Gigs has the unique opportunity to digitalize the $1T+ annual mobile subscription market by making it embeddable into any modern platform or product. We are extremely impressed by the team's vision, execution and growth globally and are very excited to partner with the entire Gigs team on this journey.”

How Gigs works

Gigs has created a unified API that allows businesses to provide phone plans via SIMs & eSIMs on a growing number of wireless networks globally. It offers a suite of software products complimenting its core API, called Gigs Connect, a hosted checkout optimized for high end-user conversion, that is fully white-label, and is as simple as embedding a link into a customer’s checkout without requiring any code. With Gigs Dashboard customers get a full overview of all subscriptions, payments and analytics in a simple interface. Ultimately, businesses can create their own mobile service that seamlessly fits their brand identity twenty times faster, simpler and cheaper by building on Gigs’s technology infrastructure, which makes Gigs the obvious choice as a connectivity provider for any innovator.

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Current investors in Gigs include: Google’s Gradient; Crane Venture Partners; YC Continuity; Speedinvest; Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber; Tony Xu, Co-founder & CEO of DoorDash; Hanno Renner, Co-founder & CEO of Personio; Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart; Max Tayenthal, Co-founder & CEO of N26; Gokul Rajaram, Executive at DoorDash; Joe Montana, former American football quarterback; Job van der Voort, Co-Founder & CEO of Remote; Michael Cassau, Co-founder & CEO of Grover; Christoph Cordes & Oliver Merkel, Co-Founders of Flink; Michael Wax, Co-Founder & CEO of Forto; Elmar Broscheit, CFO of Gorillas; Andrej Henkler, Founder & CEO of Leblon Capital; Friedrich A. Neuman of Urban Impact Capital; Patrick Andrae, Co-Founder & CEO of HomeToGo and others.