Profitable Dutch startup Braid raises €34.13 million to help brands launch their own mobile connectivity
Braid, a Dutch company that enables enterprises to launch their own branded mobile connectivity, has raised €34.13 million ($38 million) in a Series A funding round. The company also announced its rebrand from Next Communications.
The raise marks the company’s first external capital since it was founded in 2023 and was led by London-based Octopus Ventures. KPN Ventures, the strategic investment arm of Dutch telecom operator KPN, also participated in the round.
“The best infrastructure businesses make something complex feel effortless. Jignesh and the Braid team have taken an industry built around long negotiations and fragmented systems and created a materially simpler way for businesses to embed connectivity into the products their customers already use. We believe Braid is defining a new category in embedded connectivity and has the team, technology and ambition to become the default infrastructure layer for businesses delivering connectivity to their customers,” said Uthish Ranjan, Partner at Octopus Ventures.
Headquartered in The Hague, Braid was founded in 2023 by Jignesh Dave, Vishal Dave, and Mitesh Popat. The company operates across India, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. As part of this funding announcement, the company rebranded from Next Communications and claims to serve close to 90 enterprise customers, including major global FinTech and travel brands.
Before starting Braid, Jignesh Dave spent years in the UK and South African banking, including a stint at Lloyds, before building and running a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) for seven years. That experience, which cost him €500k and 18 months of runway before a single SIM was sold, became the bedrock of Braid’s foundation: infrastructure beneath a connectivity business is more valuable than the SIM card itself.
Braid offers a single API that orchestrates more than 600 carrier networks across over 200 countries, allowing enterprises to embed SIM and eSIM connectivity directly into their own products, or launch fully branded storefronts without becoming telecom operators themselves.
Its API shrinks months of carrier negotiations, regulatory filings and procurement down to minutes. The company says live trials can be up and running in three minutes and a brand-led mobile launch in as little as a week.
“I spent 18 months and half a million euros just to sell my first SIM card, and that is why Braid exists. After seven years running a mobile virtual network, I realised we weren’t really selling SIM cards. We had built the infrastructure that makes connectivity accessible to everyone,” Jignesh Dave, co-founder and CEO of Braid.
He added, “Amazon built AWS to power its own business and found it could power everyone else’s, and it was the same for us. Today a business can start in three minutes. And when brands make connectivity part of their customer experience, they unlock something far more valuable: stronger relationships, greater loyalty and new revenue.”
In practice, Braid helps an airline offer seamless roaming from the moment a passenger books a ticket; a bank can reward customers with connectivity as a loyalty benefit; a sports club can keep fans connected when they travel abroad for matches.
Braid says the company has been profitable and cash-flow positive and plans to use the new capital for international expansion, deepen the company’s carrier network, and strengthen the infrastructure that underpins its growing position in embedded connectivity. In the long term, Braid sees itself becoming the default infrastructure for enterprise connectivity globally.
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