The messaging company, which cut its staff to 120 from more than 1,000, reported $165 million of EBITDA last year. JPMorgan, Capital One and Citi led a financing structured as a dividend recapitalization.
Bird.com has found a way to return money to its shareholders without selling the company or going public. It borrowed from banks.
The communications software company said it had secured $450 million of debt financing, made up of a $400 million term loan and a $50 million revolving credit facility. The deal is a dividend recapitalization, meaning the borrowed money provides liquidity to existing shareholders rather than funding new investment. J.P. Morgan led the deal and will serve as administrative agent, with Capital One and Citi alongside it. The rest of the syndicate includes Silicon Valley Bank, MUFG, Flagstar and Huntington.
The loan is modest next to the company's earnings. Bird reported $165 million of EBITDA in 2025, a measure of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. The $400 million term loan equals about 2.4 times that figure. The company now employs 120 people, down from more than 1,000 previously, which works out to roughly $1.4 million of EBITDA per employee.
Bird, founded in 2011 by Robert Vis and based in New York and Amsterdam, provides a single set of programming interfaces for sending email, text messages, WhatsApp messages, voice calls and RCS messages in more than 150 countries. It says it handles trillions of messages a year.
The financing arrived with a product pitch aimed at artificial intelligence. Bird relaunched its platform as the Agentic Harness, a system it says gives AI agents their own phone and email capabilities, down to texting, calling and signing up for eSIM mobile plans, with no custom integration and no person approving each step.
"The world is filling up with AI agents. They can reason, plan and decide. But an agent that can't send the email, fire the text or pick up the phone never actually achieves anything," Vis said.
The choice of lenders is its own signal. A cash-generating private software company paying out to its owners is the kind of borrower private credit funds also lend to. Bird went to a syndicate of banks. It is not the only such case this month. Wealth manager Mercer Advisors priced a $1.65 billion syndicated bank loan on to replace debt held by private credit vehicles.
For Bird's owners, the recap turns part of their stake into cash now. For the company, it adds $400 million of debt that has to be serviced from the same cash flow that funds its AI push. Two things will show whether the balance holds: whether EBITDA grows from the 2025 level as the Agentic Harness reaches customers, and how much of the $50 million revolver it ends up drawing.