February the 16th, 2025 – The remarkable Croatian company Infobip has now launched a new project worth a staggering 83.5 million euros.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, following the signing of a state support agreement, Infobip has officially begun work on the development of a next-generation global communications platform. Infobip and its partners will work on this innovative project, which aims to create a fast, reliable and secure communications network. Infobip and co will work on this massive project for three years, until 2028, and will invest 83.5 million euros.

More than half of the amount (48.5 million euros) will be invested by the company itself, while the state is “helping out” with an additional 35 million euros from the Regional Development Fund. This state support was key to Infobip’s inclusion in what the EU refers to as an “Important Project of Common European Interest” (IPCEI), in the field of next-generation cloud infrastructure and services (CIS).

With its development, initiated by Germany and France back in 2020 and since joined by more than 100 partners (both companies and research organisations) from 12 countries to date, the EU aims to create an interoperable ecosystem for open access data processing. That ecosystem is the cloud-edge continuum, which is currently dominated by companies from third countries. This giant Infobip project should therefore ultimately solve the problem of dependence on individual cloud service providers. It will also strengthen the EU’s digital competitiveness compared to the US and China, and enable both the public and companies to exchange data more easily, more quickly and more reliably.

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“We’re extremely happy that Infobip, and thus Croatia, is part of the story that will strengthen the competitiveness of Europe’s IT industry and our technological future,” said Silvio Kutić, co-founder and CEO of Infobip.

The government has also stated that it is extremely proud that Croatia will be part of this story thanks to Infobip, which is one of the three world leaders in the field of CPaaS (communication platform as a service) with almost 3,500 employees. Government representatives, led by President Andrej Plenković and Ministers Šime Erlić, Damir Habijan and Marko Primorac, were full of praise for Infobip and that Croatia now has the capacity to get involved in such a large and important European project. “Infobip absolutely deserves this financial support,” emphasised Šime Erlić, Minister of Regional Development and EU Funds.

“They’ve been waiting for this support for a long time now. The story of their inclusion in IPCEI-CIS began back in 2023. It took the government a year to make a decision on granting support and almost as long to “deliver” it. They had to ceal with two years of waiting. That’s a standard procedure that didn’t last longer than expected. It is a complex process that includes 20 steps and requires maximum transparency,” he explained.

the long procedure saw mate rimac throw in the towel

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Due to this lengthy and somewhat cumbersome procedure, Croatia was left without another candidate who was supposed to participate in another IPCEI project – the EUBatIn, which is working on the development of batteries. At least that is what Rimac Technology reported to the media back in September last year, but Erlić has since claimed that the reason for Rimac’s withdrawal wasn’t the long procedure but the company’s strategic decision not to participate in that many projects.

There’s a total of 10 IPCEI projects in which companies, universities and states joined forces to work together to solve problems that they could not solve on their own in six areas. Those areas are microelectronics and communications, batteries, hydrogen, cloud and edge computing, as well as healthcare and transport connectivity between Denmark and Germany. Croatia currently has only one representative.

Infobip and this massive project will therefore be dedicated to carrying out research and development in the field of 5G technology and artificial intelligence (EI). The Vodnjan company already allocates a lot for these activities, more than 100 million euros per year. Infobip will be an indirect partner in the project, and will cooperate with numerous renowned technology companies, such as Deutsche Telekom, Atos, Orange, Telefónica, etc., as well as researchers from a dozen European universities.

Thanks to Infobip, this project will involve three Croatian universities – Algebra Bernays, the Faculty of Informatics in Pula and the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. In addition to innovation, technological progress and knowledge transfer, the Infobip project will also result in the creation of new jobs, explained Silvio Kutić. It will employ around 300 people, and the company will submit progress reports every three months.

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The goal of this large Infobip project was very clearly conveyed by Damir Prusec, Vice President of Engineering at Infobip. “About ten or so years ago, mobile phones were only used for talking. Back then, communication vendors started to fight this problem. They wanted to enable a mobile phone to be a tool with which the user could perform multiple functions at the same time – talking, browsing the Internet, transferring data, and so on. However, when many people are doing all this in the same place, the connection becomes problematic. On top of that, a problem arises when the user lives on the edge of their network’s coverage. In that case, the service they receive is slower and takes longer. This problem is solved by edge computing, which improves the user experience,” explained Prusac.

Europe has divided the solution to this problem into four parts (infrastructure, capacities, advanced tools and services, and advanced applications). Infobip will participate in the third part, the one that concerns advanced tools and services. This Vodnjan-based company already uses artificial intelligence technology extensively for this, and this will continue, according to Prusec.

“Supporting Infobip is an example of supporting excellence,” said the Prime Minister. The problem is that there are too few such examples in Croatia, and there’s plenty of conversation surrounding why that is.

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