Gigs - Launch a Mobile Service Like Magic

Company & Team Introduction

Gigs enables any company to offer customizable phone and data plans in any market they operate in, all through a single integration. Gigs offering empowers companies from various industries to offer their own mobile plans, like allowing HR platforms to provide mobile phone plans for employees in seconds or gives Fintech companies the ability to offer their own mobile plans alongside payment cards, a fantastic way to help build credit and deepen existing customer relations. The company was founded in 2020 by the entrepreneurial duo of Hermann Frank (CEO) and Dennis Bauer (President). Before Gigs, they teamed up to build HyperMesh, a platform focused on decentralized networks, and Hermann was a founding member of 5G Berlin at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, working on 5G connectivity and its potential applications, giving their leadership deep domain expertise. Gigs is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with offices in Berlin, Germany, and London, England and has quickly ramped its team up to ~126 employees.

Product Overview

Gigs enables any company in the world to quickly become their own Virtual Mobile Network Operator (MVNO) and start offering their customers mobile and data plans with both SIM/eSIM card offerings with their own branding via Gigs’ easy-to-use API in as little as 5 API calls. Gigs provides a completely white-label service that allows companies to deepen their relationship with existing customers, generate more revenue, and stabilize revenues via recurring payments while maintaining complete control over their brand. The company offers global coverage in over 200 countries through their access to various carrier networks, and companies tailor their mobile offering with text, voice, and data packages, and allows businesses to customize pricing structures based on customer needs or geography.

Total Addressable Market

The market opportunity for Gigs is enormous. The Telecom services industry has one of the largest addressable markets in the world, with a few stagnate incumbents reaping the benefits of the industry’s massive barriers to entry. According to research from Grand View Research, the total addressable market for Telecom services in the US alone was worth $468B in 2023. Gigs platform addresses a massive subsection of the Telecom services market as an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator). Grand View estimated the MVNO market was already as large as $81.81B globally in 2023 and is slated to grow at a 7.7% CAGR through 2030, ballooning Gigs future opportunity to north of $137B, and is forecasted to grow at a faster clip than the overall Telecom industry.

Business Model & The Numbers

Gigs operates using a B2B2C model where Gigs services are embedded into other businesses’ products to enhance their overall product offering. Pricing is tailored to each customer’s unique requirements, and customers are charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. This significantly decreases the historical barriers to entry for companies to provide mobile plans, as the massive upfront investment from a cost and time perspective brings considerable risk. It also aligns Gigs incentives with the success of its customers.

Traction

Gigs’ early traction has been promising. The company has already fostered impressive partnerships with some of the largest enterprises in the world, including the electronic rental marketplace Grover, as well as leading NeoBanks like market-leading NuBank and expat-focused Zolve. The gigs platform has also yielded incredible results for customers such as Xplora, a smartwatch company designed to keep kids and parents connected. The company saw remarkable results, including a 2x increase in revenue per user, an 85% conversion rate, and customers could sign up for a mobile subscription in under 3 minutes using Gigs. Gigs has also been featured in several notable publications, including TechCrunch, PCmag, and American Banker.

Competitors

Gigs platform allows companies to get their mobile offerings to the market lightning-fast. Gigs is the only Telecom-as-a-Service provider in the world that provides an end-to-end platform to quickly set up and manage mobile plan offerings instead of the traditional method of finding a single Telecom provider to integrate with, spending millions in setup costs and gruelling setup process of up to 12-15 months. Historically, this has been a costly and risky endeavour until Gigs. Companies no longer need to spend vast amounts of time and resources hiring expensive engineering, compliance, and support teams dedicated to maintaining product quality; they can use Gigs. It is important to note that Gigs platform is not a competitor to the likes of Twilio, as Twilio’s APIs allow companies to embed communications into their applications easily. In contrast, Gigs enables companies to launch their own mobile plans and data solutions.

Funding

Gigs has had multiple funding events since its founding in 2020. Their first capital came from their participation in YCombinator’s W21 batch, receiving their standard 125k investment. Gigs’s next raise came in late 2021, raising a $4M convertible note from an undisclosed group of investors. The company’s most recent funding round was a massive $20M Series A round in September 2022. The round was spearheaded by Darian Shirazi at Gradient Ventures and included a collective of other prominent VC firms such as SpeedInvest, BoxGroup, Crane Venture Partners, and the YC Continuity fund alongside notable angel investors and operators such as Tony Xu (Co-Founder/CEO, DoorDash), Dara Khosrowshahi (CEO, Uber), Fidji Simo (CEO, Instacart), Maximilian Tayenthal (Co-Founder/Co-CEO, N26), and Hanno Renner (Co-Founder/CEO, Person.io), and other undisclosed participants.