First chapter out in 2015. It’s time for new season
We’re the team behind Chatra — live chat trusted by 45,000+ small businesses and acquired by Brevo. We sold rather than go upmarket. We’re back because we still love support.
It started with an ending
It all started in 2014, when, after deciding to close our VC-backed ecommerce startup, we needed something simple to pay the bills. We thought of it as a digital döner kebab shop: no aspirations, just a good product people need.
We knew customer support from the inside, and we knew how bad the tools were. Twenty established competitors signaled: there’s room for a twenty-first.
We launched in mid-2015, when Intercom, the company now known as Fin, still had only an in-app SDK. We beat them to a proper web chat widget — if only by a few months.
What we did to live chat
2015 live chat was all clunky widgets that lost the conversation on every page reload, team dashboards straight out of Windows 95, and canned corporate everything.
Chatra other chats
We rebuilt it as a messenger. Conversations that persisted like on your phone, including unsent drafts. A dashboard that felt warm. Team member avatars, read receipts, and visitors with names instead of numbers, and messages you could edit after sending.
We called it live chat software designed for humans. Tens of thousands of clients agreed — served by nine people in three countries, with no office, no ads, and no venture capital.
The exit we never planned
Chatra wasn’t meant to be sold. It was a profitable bootstrapped business with a cherished product. Growing, and calm. We weren’t looking for more — but maybe that’s why an acquisition found us.
The offer came from Sendinblue, now Brevo: a European SMB marketing and communications unicorn that wanted Chatra as the missing piece of its platform. In 2021, we signed, as part of a $47M deal.
The usual SaaS playbook is to start with small businesses, then climb upmarket and abandon them — most competitors did exactly that. We didn’t want to, and acquisition meant there’d be no pressure.
The dawn of AI, from the trenches
We were at Brevo, building messaging at unicorn scale, when ChatGPT launched. Suddenly, making AI work for small-business support was the job.
For some of us, it stayed the job while at Brevo. Right up until NetIntent.
Chatra today
Acquirers usually merge products like ours into their platforms. Chatra wasn’t folded and wasn’t sunset: with no new features released since 2021, it still runs great, and tens of thousands rely on it every day.
We take that as the best compliment.
Why we’re back
After the acquisition, the only way for us to stay in the field was to work at Brevo. No complaints — but we’re bootstrappers at heart, and someone else’s company could never feel like home.
Now we’re free to be back in the game, doing what we love most: making support better for your customers, and for you.
Small businesses aren’t a stepping stone to us. They’re the point.
So, NetIntent
We’re doing what we did last time: taking the clunky, corporate version of an essential tool and making it human. Live chat with an AI coworker you can trust — simple, honestly priced, with a generous free plan that’s free forever.
Designed for humans. Including those on your side of the chat.
Get early accessTry what we’re building
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