conversational-messaging
(3)
Hustle
Hustle is a San Francisco-based text and mobile messaging platform built for one-to-one conversations at scale. Founded in 2014, it lets organizations reach supporters, students, members and voters through peer-to-peer texting, broadcast SMS, a voice dialer and in-message video - with humans, not autodialers, pressing send. Widely used by political campaigns, nonprofits, higher-education fundraising teams and labor unions, Hustle has powered more than a billion messages and, since April 2026, is independent and employee-owned.
TextUs
TextUs is a Denver-based business texting platform that gives revenue and recruiting teams real, two-way SMS conversations at scale. It pairs each team with dedicated business phone numbers, a shared inbox, automated campaigns, keywords, and analytics, and plugs directly into CRMs and applicant tracking systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, Bullhorn, Greenhouse and Workday. The pitch is simple: text messages get read and answered while email and voicemail get ignored, so teams that text close, hire, and retain faster.
Martin Payne
Martin Payne is the CEO of TextUs, the Denver-based business texting platform built for recruiting, inside sales, and customer service teams. A career operator of growth-stage technology companies, he came up through the U.S. Air Force, Global Healthcare Exchange, GutCheck, and Mersive Technologies before taking the TextUs helm in 2020. He runs the company on a 'do the right thing' philosophy and is betting that text - conversational, human, and immediate - is the future of how businesses talk to people.