Crisp

Valerian Saliou and Baptiste Jamin started Crisp in Nantes, France in 2015 with a two-person team and a clear mission: build the best customer support inbox for businesses, and never take VC money. They started with a simple live chat widget and expanded into a full unified inbox — email, chat, Messenger, Telegram, Instagram, WhatsApp — all in one place. Crisp's engineering-first culture meant they built real-time infrastructure capable of handling hundreds of millions of monthly message events without outside capital. They bootstrapped entirely on customer revenue. Ten years in, 600,000 companies use Crisp and 250 million people engage with those companies through the platform every month. Revenue reached $1.4M annually with a lean team. In 2024, Valerian and Baptiste announced a "fresh start" — opening the architecture further and repositioning for the next decade. A rare story of a two-person founding team building a messaging infrastructure company that scaled to enterprise level without VC pressure.