Top Messaging Startups in 2026

Pendo helps people adopt software more quickly and successfully. Pendo customers include the world’s leading software companies and digital enterprises, including Verizon, RE/MAX, LabCorp, OpenTable, Okta, Salesforce, and Zendesk. Founded in 2013 in the heart of Raleigh, North Carolina, Pendo is backed by Battery Ventures, Spark Capital, Meritech Capital and Sapphire Ventures. Through its ProductCraft and customer communities, sponsored events and podcast, Pendo aims to support the success of product and digital leaders everywhere. For more information, visit: pendo.io

Since our very first day in 2015, mattermost has never wavered on its goal to transform the enterprise collaboration market by delivering the most compelling open source, high-trust messaging tools for security-conscious enterprises and developers. we’ve grown from our very first customer to thousands of companies downloading our messaging platform every month.

Slack is a messaging platform for teams that brings all communication together, creating a single unified archive accessible through powerful search. Launched in February 2014, Slack is the fastest growing B2B application ever and used by over 3 million daily active users.

Manychat is a Meta Official Business Partner, backed by top investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, and one of America's Best Startup Employers. With 110+ teammates across three global offices — New York, Barcelona, and Yerevan — Manychat helps more than one million businesses worldwide interact with billions of customers in real-time at scale. No matter the use case — generating leads, increasing engagement, providing 24/7 customer support, accepting payments, and beyond — Manychat helps businesses improve their ROI and grow faster.

Founded in 2015, Discord is a voice, video and text app that helps friends and communities come together to hang out and explore their interests - from artists and activists, to study groups, sneakerheads, plant parents, and more. With 150 million monthly users across 19 million active communities, called servers, Discord has grown to become one of the most popular communications services in the world. Discord was built without selling ads or user data and instead, offers a premium subscription called Nitro that gives users special perks like higher quality streams and fun customizations.

Inspired by Stanford research, Arist helps leading companies deliver learning, training, and nudges in the flow of work via Teams, Slack, and text message-based courses. Used by over 10% of the Fortune 500, Arist is a pioneer in meeting learners where they are. Message-based courses consist of 1,200-character concept or case study "blocks" texted to the user every morning over the course of 5-30 days. Each block can include images, GIFs, and assessments. By utilizing cutting-edge research from Stanford and UPenn, message-based courses have completion and satisfaction rates of over 90% (vs. ~5% for video courses). In fact, we view message-based courses as a brand-new content medium, with a variety of impactful use cases ranging from preventing misinformation to COVID-19 training in refugee camps to DEI training for startups. Arist is backed by Y Combinator, Craft Ventures, and a number of leading learning executives. If you'd like to learn more, check out our deck: docsend.com/view/bafzt6mffry5tigf 

ABOUT ARTERA Our Mission: Make healthcare #1 in customer service. What We Deliver: Artera (formerly WELL Health®) is the patient communication platform that delivers happier staff, healthier patients, and more profitable organizations. We enable two-way conversations between patients and their healthcare teams through secure, multilingual messaging across multiple channels – including text, email, and telephone. By unifying disjointed touchpoints into a single, intuitive channel, Artera fuels connected patient experiences and empowers organizations to deliver the best customer service imaginable. Our Impact: Artera helps 500+ healthcare providers facilitate more than 1 billion messages for 40+ million patients annually. Our award-winning culture: In 2021, Artera was named #10 on the Forbes list of America’s Best Startup Employers, as well as being named one of Deloitte’s Fast 500 (#133). Artera was also recognized as one of the Best Midsize Companies to Work for in Los Angeles by Built In in 2022, and has been ranked on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for three consecutive years. All of our open roles can be found at artera.io/careers

Intercom is the world’s first customer platform helping internet businesses accelerate growth. Thanks to the internet, the way people communicate is drastically different than it was 10, even 5 years ago. Messengers like WhatsApp have become the preferred mode of communication in every aspect of consumers’ lives, and now that switch is happening with businesses too. Intercom builds a suite of messaging-first products that all modern internet businesses can use to accelerate growth across the customer lifecycle- from acquisition, to engagement, and support. Today more than 25,000 businesses, including New Relic, Sotheby’s, and Shopify, use Intercom to connect with a billion unique people worldwide.

Hootsuite is the most widely used platform for managing social media, loved by over 10 million people around the globe and trusted by more than 800 of the Fortune 1000. With Hootsuite, brands harness the power of social. Our platform brings together your social networks and integrates with hundreds of business applications. It’s the one place to build customer relationships, listen to the needs of the market and grow your revenue.

Regroup is the leading Mass Messaging System. With the click of a button, you can easily message contacts via Text message, Voice message, Facebook, Twitter, Email, and your own website. Regroup is the official emergency notifications partner for Datatel and Sungard Higher Education (Ellucian). Regroup is a market leader in ease of use, value, message speed and reliability, and integrations. Regroup regularly saves organizations money while improving internal and external communications.