Stockholders of New York communication company Kaleyra have agreed to its proposed takeover by Tata Communications.

Kaleyra was founded in 1999 as Ubiquity in Italy and rebranded to Kaleyraafter acquiring the Indian company Solutions Infini in 2016. In 2018, Kaleyra acquired the US-based company Buc Mobile, which owned Hook Mobile. It became a listed company in NYSE American in 2019.

In 2021, Kaleyra acquired US-based mobile messaging provider MGag for $215m and became a tier-one messaging provider in the USA. A month later, Kaleyra acquired Bandyer, a European company specialising in audio and video APIs and SDKs.

In February this year in Ireland, Kaleyra pleaded guilty to 22 charges relating to breaches of the Communications Regulation Act. This was as a result of a malware incident that led to so-called spoofing, which saw customers’ numbers being falsely signed up for premium rate services. Following this, Kaleyra withdrew from the Irish market.

Kaleyra is a global group providing mobile communication services to financial institutions, ecommerce players, OTTs, software companies, logistic enablers, healthcare providers, retailers and other large organisations. Through its proprietary platform and APIs, Kaleyra manages multi-channel integrated communication services, consisting of messaging, rich messaging and instant messaging, video, push notifications, email, voice services,and chatbots.

Its technology makes it possible to manage billions of messages monthly with over 1600 operator connections in more than 190 countries, including all tier-one US carriers.

Tata announced its plan to acquire Kaleyra in June in a cash only transaction, at a price per share of $7.25 for a total consideration to Kaleyra shareholders of approximately $100m and the assumption of all outstanding debt. Kaleyra will become a subsidiary of Tata Communications. For 2022, Kaleyra reported revenue of $339.2m, up 26.7% on the previous year.

“With this investment in Kaleyra, we will accelerate our push into the customer interactions platform market and fortify our global commtech position,” said AS Lakshminarayanan, CEO of Tata Communications (www.tatacommunications.com). “We are excited about Kaleyra’s remarkable talent and their demonstrated capabilities in next-gen technologies. With this acquisition, we will further build intelligent, intuitive and innovative multi-channel communications to unlock new growth opportunities for our customers.”

Dario Calogero, CEO of Kaleyra (www.kaleyra.com), added: “When we launched Kaleyra 24 years ago with my co-founder Simone Fubini, I could hardly envision that our voyage would take us from a small Italian start-up, to global expansion, a publicly listed NYSE company, and now working together with a great technology leader like Tata Communications. This is a great day for Kaleyra and our shareholders, and our employees worldwide.”