Armand Thiberge and the business that outgrew its name

The business began with €1,500 left over from military pay and an office without air conditioning on the outskirts of New Delhi. Armand Thiberge had gone to India to work on web projects after engineering school. In January 2007, he started the venture that would eventually become Brevo. He found his business partner through a local classified-ad service. An international software company would follow. At the beginning, there was money for a modest start and a willingness to answer an advertisement.

His education offered a rather more orderly route into working life. He belonged to École Polytechnique’s 2002 cohort; his academic background also includes ENSAE and Sciences Po Paris. Yet the career took shape through small commercial jobs far from the French institutions on his résumé. Building websites for entrepreneurs brought him into contact with people whose budgets were tight and whose needs were immediate. A clever application still had to earn its place in somebody else’s working day.

One customer wanted an email-sending platform. In his later telling, the software was delivered and the client disappeared without paying. The phone number stopped working. Thiberge kept the product, reworked it, and offered it to other customers. It is an origin story with an awkwardly practical villain: an unpaid invoice. The useful discovery was that the work could be sold again. A service business, accustomed to starting afresh for each customer, had something repeatable on its hands.

That distinction matters more than the familiar glamour of becoming a founder. An agency sells a succession of projects. Software can reach customers who never meet its makers. The product launched in 2012, five years after the agency began. Those years gave the engineers a succession of actual problems to solve before they had a platform to promote. The chronology is slow enough to be interesting: the product emerged from the work.

The customer had a vote

Thiberge’s advice to would-be software founders has an insistent rhythm: “Listen to your client, listen to your client, listen to your client”. Repetition is useful here. A customer can ask for a newsletter without asking for a company to be built around it. Recognising the wider opportunity requires attention to the request, then attention to the next person with the same problem. His early experience put those conversations close to the engineering.

Kapil Sharma, his co-founder, belongs in that account. The venture grew from their work together in India, rather than appearing fully formed in a Paris office. By 2021, Sendinblue was reporting more than 175,000 customers and 75 percent of revenue outside France. Its international life had begun before international expansion became a line in an investor presentation. The relationship between its French identity and Indian origins is part of the company’s working history.

The acquisition strategy extended that history. Chatra, Metrilo, and PushOwl brought chat, analytics, and push-notification capabilities into the business. Buying other companies meant buying product expertise as well as an established customer base. For Thiberge, the expanding platform made the original problem larger: how to help a business keep in touch with its customers as those customers moved between different channels. Email remained useful. It had acquired neighbours.

This creates a demanding job for a founder who talks about simplicity. Every extra capability offers another reason to buy the software, and another opportunity to make it harder to understand. A small-business owner does not acquire an extra afternoon just because a vendor adds another menu. Thiberge’s promise of accessible tools therefore becomes more difficult to keep as the company grows. Breadth has to justify the attention it asks of the person using it.

When “send” stopped being enough

In May 2023, Sendinblue became Brevo. The change followed a shift in how customers used the software: only 31 percent were still focused solely on newsletters. SMS, WhatsApp, and chat had widened the offer into customer relationship management. A name built around sending messages was describing an increasingly narrow part of the business. The company had outgrown the sign on its door.

A rebrand can be a costly way of announcing that somebody has discovered a new shade of green. This one had a more concrete argument behind it. The customer’s relationship with a business could involve a campaign, a conversation, and a subsequent sale. Thiberge wanted the product to serve more of that relationship. Brevo gave the expanded offer a name without the old verb attached.

He also appeared surprised by the public visibility that followed. In a LinkedIn post about Brevo’s advertising campaign, he wrote of seeing the company on television, radio, and in the métro, and of how difficult that would have been to imagine ten years earlier. It is a small glimpse of the distance between the founder’s remembered business and the organisation visible to everyone else. A company can become familiar in public while remaining surprising to its own creator.

Who owns the next chapter?

Thiberge’s approach to growth includes a fairly literal interest in giving colleagues a stake. Discussing Brevo’s culture in 2025, he linked employee share ownership with people taking responsibility for their work and participating in the company’s success. In the same account, he said 99 percent of customers subscribed on their own. The business was designed to let customers act independently; he wanted employees to feel similarly involved in what they were building.

The December 2025 financing changed the shareholder register. General Atlantic and Oakley Capital joined; Bpifrance and Bridgepoint remained minority investors, and Partech exited. Management and employees together became the largest shareholder group. The wording is important: a largest group need not own more than half the company. What the transaction preserved was a substantial collective place for the people operating the business.

The announced financing was €500 million, and Brevo entered the unicorn category. By then, its reach extended across 180 countries. These are company milestones, rather than a measure of Thiberge’s personal fortune. For a founder who had started by selling web-development work, the new investors offered another set of partners for a much larger task. The capital structure had changed along with the size of the ambition.

“J’ai appris sur le tas.”

Armand Thiberge
I learned on the job.

An accountant’s question for an engineer

There is a useful complication in his account of money. In July 2026, Thiberge said Brevo’s first loss came in 2018, after heavy investment, particularly in marketing. The loss was €3 million. He also said he wished he had invested faster at the beginning and hired people he had once considered too expensive. Prudence, in his telling, could protect the business and slow its construction. Both lessons survived.

“J’ai appris sur le tas,” he said: he learned on the job. That admission has more texture than a tidy rule about always raising money or always avoiding it. He described debt as a way to limit dilution, while acknowledging the value of professional investors’ outside judgment. Spending well was the difficulty. Having money available did not automatically teach the organisation how to use it.

The next numerical ambition is clear. Brevo said it expected to exceed €200 million in annual recurring revenue in 2025, with a double-digit EBITDA margin, and set a goal of €1 billion in annual revenue by 2030. The latter remains a target. Reading the two figures together gives a sense of the distance still to travel, rather than a victory already achieved. The engineer now has a larger machine to build and a financial timetable beside it.

Europe, with the windows open

Artificial intelligence is one part of that work. Brevo announced a €50 million, five-year commitment to its AI Lab in February 2025. By the December financing announcement, the company described new marketing, sales, and conversations agents, alongside connections to external AI assistants. Thiberge’s task is to fit these capabilities into a product whose appeal has depended on people being able to use it without ceremony. An impressive demonstration is easier than a useful Tuesday morning.

His stated ambition is to “build a global European CRM leader capable of competing with US players through product excellence”. The European part is deliberate; so is the global part. His business began through collaboration across borders, and he continues to present European technology as something that should compete internationally. The argument asks Europe to build and own more of the tools it uses while keeping customers elsewhere in view.

That interest reaches beyond software. Thiberge founded SolarinBlue in late 2019 to develop floating solar technology for offshore conditions. The company inaugurated its Sun’Sète demonstrator in March 2023. Here the engineering problem has waves attached. A photovoltaic installation at sea must contend with physical conditions that a web application can usually ignore. The venture gives his interest in technology a different material form.

His other ventures include Ironflow Batteries, concerned with iron-based energy storage, and STRYX AI, a counter-drone business launched in 2025. His public account connects these activities through European sovereignty in digital technology, energy, and defence. They are separate businesses with separate engineering demands. Taken together, they show how far his aspirations extend beyond the email platform that first gave him a repeatable product.

The original lesson remains surprisingly portable. Someone has a problem; an engineer builds something; other people decide whether it deserves a place in their lives. Thiberge’s problems have grown from a newsletter to international customer relationships and offshore power. His language has grown to include Europe’s autonomy. The beginnings still supply a useful standard for everything that follows: make the thing work, then persuade somebody to use it. Preferably somebody who pays the invoice.