The South African whose global SMS company helped WhatsApp become a messaging giant

Clickatell, a South African company that pioneered sending SMS messages from computers, was instrumental in helping WhatsApp become the messaging giant it is today.

This is according to Clickatell CEO Pieter de Villiers, who explained that a key element to WhatsApp’s success is how easy it was to begin using the platform.

WhatsApp was effectively a drop-in replacement for SMS. You didn’t need to create and remember a username or password before you could begin using it — it only required a cellular phone number.

It then sends you a one-time PIN, which you must type into the app to prove that you control the phone number.

This seamless account creation and logon journey was made possible by Clickatell’s application programming interface (API) for SMS messaging.

In a 2020 interview with TechCentral, De Villiers explained that Clickatell and WhatsApp shared a common investor — Sequoia Capital.

“When WhatsApp started using our services, they did it for a unique use case, which was, ‘How do I get my mobile app to be downloaded but without asking users for email addresses, usernames, and passwords?'” said De Villiers.

“So, WhatsApp eclipsed all other chat apps at the time because of their beautifully designed user journey and frictionless onboarding.”

De Villiers said more than half a billion WhatsApp users were onboarded through their platform.

Clickatell was founded in 2000 by Pieter de Villiers, his twin brother Casper, and their two friends Danie du Toit and Patrick Lawson.

The four men set out to create an application programming interface (API) between cellular phones and computers.

They lay claim to creating the first such API in the world, allowing computer programs to send SMS messages from the Internet to cellphones in four lines of code.

De Villiers, who became Clickatell’s CEO, initially studied optometry at the University of Johannesburg.

However, the reality of optometry didn’t live up to his expectations.

“Optometry as a science degree is fascinating because it’s the convergence between mathematics, physics, and biology,” said De Villiers.

“If you think about the eye being organic, yet you have lenses to make it operate properly — that was fascinating as a student,” he said.

“But once you start your career, you become a retailer. I was just perpetually unhappy,” De Villiers continued.

“Most entrepreneurs start their entrepreneurial journey because they either lose their job or they hate their job. I guess I’m just another one of those.”

Clickatell enjoyed rapid and costly success in those early days.

Clickatell had offered a free SMS option as a marketing tool, which quickly racked up a substantial bill with South African mobile network operators.

“The operators kept calling for us to pay the bill. We had no idea how we were going to pay at the time,” De Villiers said.

“We were just dodging the calls.”

An angel investor stepped in with a R600,000 cheque with the condition that Clickatell settles its R500,000 debt with the operators and shut down its free offering.

In 2005, De Villiers travelled to Silicon Valley in the United States to try and secure venture capital funding.

However, he said they did not receive the time of day until they committed to having a presence in the country.

“So we actually bought a business called Multimode — in San Mateo, in Silicon Valley,” said De Villiers.

“Only after that, when I moved to be based in Silicon Valley, did we get a proper entry to some of the top VCs there.”

That following year, in 2006, Sequoia Capital invested in Clickatell. It was Sequoia’s first investment into a South African startup, and it would be many years before its second.

De Villiers spent nearly ten years in San Francisco, where he grew Clickatell into a multi-million-dollar company operating across multiple continents.

The company says it now serves thousands of businesses across more than 220 territories.

This has been aided by its move into payments and e-commerce, having launched chat banking and chat commerce services in recent years.

Through its Chat Commerce platform, Clickatell’s relationship with WhatsApp continues as it offers merchants a way to send customers a payment link in a chat that lets them easily make payments from their smartphones.

In February 2022, Clickatell secured $91 million (R1.6 billion) in their Series C funding round.

Clickatell’s headquarters remains in Silicon Valley, although it also has offices in Cape Town, Lagos, and Toronto.