Community, which was first marketed as a way for celebrities to text their fans, now has big brands on board.


The actor Ashton Kutcher co-founded Community, a text message company, in 2019.

Andrew here. You probably received today’s DealBook newsletter, as you always do, by email. But you probably got a bunch of spam and junk mail in your inbox, too.

That’s why so many of us are moving our most important communications to text messages. And in the process, the “text inbox” has become the new holy space for brands, far more intimate than your social media feed.

At least, that’s the bet that Ashton Kutcher, the actor turned venture capitalist, and Guy Oseary, Bono’s and Madonna’s manager turned investor, made when they co-founded a text message company called Community in 2019. In the beginning, it was marketed to celebrities to communicate with their fans about tour dates and new projects.

But over the last year, the business has quietly grown to power text messages from some of the largest brands, like McDonald’s, HBO, the New York Yankees and Condé Nast. When this month’s Hollywood blockbuster, “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” launched an advertising campaign, it came with a phone number for viewers to text, powered by Community.


The company plans to announce next week that it has raised another $25 million, bringing its total fund-raising to $110 million, from investors such as Salesforce Ventures, Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund and Verizon Ventures. (It did not disclose its latest valuation.)

It also made Robert Wolf, a former chairman of UBS Group Americas, who served as an informal adviser to President Barack Obama, its new chairman. He started helping to sign up large corporate customers over the past year, bringing the total clients to over 8,000. The company is run by Diankha Linear, a longtime executive who served as an Army logistics and transportation officer.

Community has gained its latest funding as questions have increasingly arisen about social media’s reach and how companies can own the digital relationship with their customers without a middleman like Facebook or Twitter.

“I started out with Twitter and built a fairly large following on Twitter,” said Mr. Kutcher, who has 16.8 million followers. “But Twitter today is very different than what Twitter was when I originally started playing around it,” he added. “The click-through rates are massively degraded — the number of people that actually see the post is massively degraded.”

At Community, in contrast, “we have like 45 percent click-through rates and 98 percent open rates,” Mr. Kutcher said. “You don’t get that in social environments because most people don’t even see the things you’re posting.”