📡 The Big Story
RCS just went from "sure, someday" to "wait, holy crap"
Infobip dropped its H1 2026 numbers this week and the headline is genuinely wild: 169.3% global RCS traffic growth year-over-year, and 1,298.8% in the US. That's not a typo. US RCS traffic grew nearly 13x. For a channel that spent most of the last decade being the messaging equivalent of "we'll circle back next quarter," this is a vibe shift.
Here's what actually happened. Apple flipped the switch, enterprises spent 2025 kicking the tires, and now the pilots are turning into production traffic. Retailers, banks, and airlines are the early movers, and they're not just sending pretty confirmations. They're moving high-intent flows, verified sender branding, rich carousels, and order tracking. When a Fortune 500 CX team sees a 30% lift in tap-through versus SMS, that budget moves fast.
What does this mean for the rest of us? SMS isn't going anywhere (it's still the universal fallback and always will be), but the "premium lane" of A2P is officially being paved. If you're a CPaaS, RCS is no longer optional. If you're an enterprise sender still on plain 10DLC, your competitor's messages are about to look a lot better than yours. 🔥
🔥 What's Moving
GSMA ships RCS Universal Profile 4.1 👀
Right on cue, the GSMA published UP 4.1, with refined E2E encryption interoperability, better privacy controls, and lighter interworking between networks. Faster delivery, less battery drain, steadier group chats. This is the biggest RCS standards update since Apple joined the party, and honestly, the timing with Infobip's traffic numbers is chef's kiss.
The unglamorous parts of this spec (interworking, encryption handshakes across ecosystems) are exactly what enterprise buyers ask about in procurement. Standards maturity is how RCS graduates from "cool demo" to "line item in the 2027 budget."
Sent raises $12M Series A for agentic messaging 👀
Sent just closed a $12M round from Bessemer, Companyon, and friends to build an API that routes AI agent traffic across SMS, WhatsApp, and RCS based on user preference. 75+ direct carrier relationships, 1B unique numbers reachable. The pitch: as AI agents take over more B2C messaging, someone has to decide which channel each message goes down.
This is a category worth watching. Not because $12M is a huge round (it isn't), but because "agentic messaging" is the first genuinely new positioning I've seen in CPaaS in a while. Twilio, Sinch, and Infobip will all have opinions about this soon. Actually, they'll probably just build it.
Google Messages falls behind the spec it was supposed to lead 🤡
With UP 4.1 shipping, Google Messages is now trailing the GSMA standard by another version. This would be funny if Google weren't also the default Android RCS client now that Samsung Messages is sunsetting. The RCS champion is showing up to its own party late. Every time.
The TCPA cleanup after Steidinger 💀
Barnes & Thornburg put out a solid practitioner note reminding everyone that the Seventh Circuit's July 14 Steidinger ruling (marketing texts aren't "telephone calls" under one key TCPA provision) does NOT mean you can go send whatever you want. 227(b) ATDS claims, state mini-TCPAs (looking at you, Florida and Washington), and consent requirements are all still very much alive. Please, for the love of deliverability, don't let your marketing team read one headline and go feral.
Twilio ships WhatsApp usernames, RCS updates, 10DLC upgrades 😴
Per the July platform recap, Twilio pushed WhatsApp username support, RCS enhancements, and 10DLC campaign management improvements. Solid, expected, on the roadmap. This is Twilio playing defense against Infobip and Sinch as RCS scales. Nothing wrong with defense, but nothing thrilling here either.
🏆 Winner of the Week: RCS itself. A traffic explosion, a standards update, and Apple's ongoing thumbs-up. Best week the protocol has ever had.
📉 Loser of the Week: Google Messages, for managing to fall behind the RCS spec while being the default Android RCS client. Impressive, in a bad way.
📊 By the Numbers
- 1,298.8% - US RCS traffic growth in H1 2026 vs H1 2025, per Infobip. Nearly 13x. If your 2026 messaging strategy doesn't mention RCS, you're writing fiction.
- $12M - Sent's Series A to build "agentic messaging" routing. Small round, big signal. VCs are pricing in the AI-agent-messaging thesis.
- 75+ - Direct carrier relationships Sent claims out of the gate. For context, that's the kind of footprint that used to take CPaaS companies 5+ years to build. The moat is shrinking.
🔮 What We're Watching
How the big three CPaaS respond to Sent. Twilio, Infobip, and Sinch all technically already route across channels, but "agentic messaging" as a positioning is new. Expect at least one of them to rebrand a product line with the word "agent" in it by Q4. Book it.
Q3 earnings season. Twilio, Sinch, and Bandwidth report in the next 6 weeks. After Infobip's public traffic numbers, RCS revenue disclosure is going to become a thing investors ask about. Whoever ducks the question loses points.
💡 The Hot Take
Here's my bold prediction: within 18 months, "SMS-only" A2P providers will be the new "landline-only" telcos. Not dead, still functional, but structurally uncool and increasingly hard to sell to any enterprise buyer under 45.
The Infobip numbers aren't a blip. They're the leading edge of a permanent split in the A2P market between the premium lane (RCS + WhatsApp + agentic routing + verified branding) and the utility lane (plain SMS, mostly for 2FA and fallback). Both lanes will exist forever. But the margin, the innovation, and the enterprise budget are moving to the premium lane, fast.
The CPaaS vendors who spent 2024-2025 whining that "RCS will never take off in the US" are about to spend 2026-2027 explaining to their boards why their competitors' RCS revenue is growing 10x while theirs isn't. Meanwhile, the smart teams are already building for a world where an AI agent decides in 40 milliseconds whether your message goes over RCS, WhatsApp, or SMS, and the human on the other end never notices or cares.
That's the whole game now. Everything else is just noise.
See you next week. 📡
