Messaging when it matters - to the phones the internet forgot.
THE MARK. Telerivet's pixel-square wordmark - a nod to the SMS grid it was built on. The whole company started with one Android phone and a local SIM.
Somewhere right now a clinic reminder lands on a feature phone in rural Kenya. A field worker checks in by SMS from a road with no data signal. A refugee gets an alert in a language and a channel their phone actually speaks. None of it trends. All of it matters. Behind a surprising share of those messages sits a quiet piece of infrastructure named Telerivet.
Most communications companies chase the connected - the smartphone owners, the app-store natives, the well-served metros. Telerivet went the other way. Its founders had seen, up close, the roughly four billion people who carry a phone but not the internet, and they built a platform for exactly that reality: send a message across SMS, WhatsApp, Voice, USSD or Viber, and reach the person on whatever their handset already understands.
The origin is almost stubbornly humble. Joshua Stern went to Tanzania with the Peace Corps, worked on local ICT skills, then co-founded a non-profit called Envaya that grew into the largest online network of civil society organizations in East Africa. Trying to text those groups at scale, he and fellow Stanford engineer Jesse Young hit a wall - the SMS tools they needed simply did not exist or did not work. So they wrote their own. The first gateway was not a data center. It was an Android phone sitting on a desk with a local SIM card, quietly firing texts.
“A non-programmer can do sophisticated things with text messaging.”
Telerivet is a cloud messaging platform - a place to send, automate and orchestrate communications without hiring a telecom team. You can build automated mobile interactions with a drag-and-drop Rules Engine, wire it up through the API and cloud scripting engine, or let AI configure the flow. Then you point it at whatever your audience uses.
Drag, drop, and deploy sophisticated two-way campaigns, polls and workflows - no engineer required on the day-to-day.
Turn an Android phone with a local SIM into an SMS gateway, reaching recipients even when neither end has internet.
Distribute mobile airtime as incentives across 550+ networks in 150+ countries - a currency that travels the last mile.
Integrations include Zendesk, Zapier, CommCare, Twilio, Vonage and Africa's Talking. Certified SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001:2022.
Enterprises, governments, NGOs and universities run Telerivet for appointment reminders, field-worker check-ins, payment confirmations, loyalty programs, public-health campaigns, polling and surveys. The named roster reads like a map of who is trying to reach people at the edge of the network.
Stanford CS. Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania. Co-founded the non-profit Envaya, then Telerivet in 2012. Former Apture engineer (acquired by Google). Has advised Tanzania's Commission for Science and Technology and U.S. Senator Angus King.
Stanford M.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Electrical Engineering. Former chief engineer at Apture. Leads Telerivet's engineering - the person turning "a phone on a desk" into a platform for 150+ countries.
Board includes Alex Gurevich (Javelin Venture Partners) and Alec Ross (former U.S. State Department Senior Advisor for Innovation).
Stern serves in the Peace Corps in Tanzania and co-founds Envaya, East Africa's largest online network of civil society organizations - and the source of the problem Telerivet would solve.
Stern and Young found Telerivet and raise a $1M seed led by Javelin Venture Partners. The pitch: let anyone build their own SMS service, anywhere in the world.
The platform grows from SMS into WhatsApp, Voice/IVR, USSD, Viber and airtime transfer, adding a no-code Rules Engine, APIs, and enterprise-grade SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification.
Telerivet layers AI configuration onto its rules engine while holding the same mission - messaging that reaches anyone, on any channel, in any market.
Return to the feature phone in rural Kenya. A decade ago, reaching it meant an engineer, a carrier deal, and a stack of tools that mostly did not work. Today an NGO coordinator opens Telerivet, drags a few blocks into a rule, picks SMS because that is what the phone speaks, and hits send. The reminder arrives. The appointment gets kept. Nothing about it trends.
That is the whole point. Telerivet did not set out to make communication louder - it set out to make it reach. From an Android phone on a Tanzanian desk to a command center orchestrating six channels across 150+ countries, the idea never changed: build for the phone that exists, and the last mile stops being the hard part.
Some figures (revenue, team size) are third-party estimates and marked approximate. Facts drawn from Telerivet.com, TechCrunch, Crunchbase and public profiles.