Arino One takes third place at the Infobip Shift 2026 Startup Pitch Competition
Arino One co-founder and director Brian Pike took to the Startup Stage at Infobip Shift 2026 in Zadar, Croatia, to pitch the operating system for conversational business — and came away with third place in the Startup Competition, a room full of new connections and exactly what the team went there for.
Ten startups, one stage
Shift is Infobip's annual developer conference, and the 2026 edition brought around 3,000 guests from more than 600 companies to Zadar. Alongside the main programme, the expanded startup track — a Startup Stage, Startup Expo and VC Corner — culminated in the Startup Competition, where ten finalists pitched live to the audience and an international jury of investors and industry leaders.
Arino One pitched as a member of Infobip's Startup Tribe and finished third. Congratulations to Mediqcode, who took first place, and to Upstream.so in second — and thank you to the judges for their time, their questions and their feedback.
The pitch: a real client request
Rather than open with a market slide, Brian opened with a message from a client. Sinapsis, one of Romania's leading educational publishers, came to Arino One needing automations, quick replies, WhatsApp Flows and forms running across six dedicated WhatsApp numbers — reaching tens of thousands of teachers — with full Meta compliance and GDPR built in from day one.
That request captures the problem Arino One exists to solve. AI app builders such as Lovable, Cursor and Replit have made it remarkably fast to build software. What they don't do is the hard part of conversational business: Meta's approval rules, WhatsApp template categories and rejections, number verification, the quirks of Viber and RCS, consent records and GDPR. That is where most projects stall — and where Arino One lives.
You can read how that deployment was built in the Sinapsis customer story.
Where Arino One sits
Brian framed Arino One as the layer between the tools people use to build apps and the infrastructure that delivers the messages:
- Applications — built on Lovable, Cursor, Replit or any modern AI app builder.
- Arino Core — automations, quick replies, flows, forms, a shared inbox, contacts and AI agents, delivered as a dedicated instance each client owns. Never a shared account.
- Communications infrastructure — Infobip for WhatsApp, SMS, RCS, email, voice and 18+ channels, and Meta directly where that suits the client.
The result: a business can go from an idea to a compliant, multichannel conversational platform in days rather than months, with GDPR as the baseline and the hosting region of their choice.
"Why not just build it yourself?"
It is the first question any investor asks of a company built on AI development tools, so the pitch answered it head-on. Anyone can remix the Arino One template on Lovable for free — and that's deliberate. The value isn't the code. It is years of hands-on expertise in Meta compliance, template approvals, sender verification and conversational marketing, plus the integrations with Claude, OpenAI and ElevenLabs that turn a messaging account into an operating system for the business.
"Building the app is the easy part now. Getting it approved, compliant and actually talking to customers is where businesses get stuck — that's the gap we close."
Brian Pike, Co-Founder & Director, Arino OneBacked by the partners that matter
The pitch was grounded in a partner ecosystem that few teams our size can point to. Arino One is a Lovable Certified and Select Solutions Partner, a global Infobip partner, and a Select-level partner in Meta's Business Messaging Accelerator — and works alongside Cursor and Replit as an AI app-building partner.
What's next
Shift was three days of sharp conversations, excellent pitches and genuinely useful feedback. The team left Zadar with more clarity, stronger relationships and several new ideas already moving into the product. There are exciting updates coming soon — watch this space.
Thank you to the Infobip team, the Startup Tribe and the Shift organisers for an event of this quality, and to everyone who stopped by to talk about what we're building.
See what Arino One can build for you
Bring your use case — WhatsApp, voice, SMS or all 18+ channels — and we'll map the fastest compliant path to your first live conversation.
Press coverage: Infobip Shift 2026: Mediqcode pobjednik startup natjecanja · Infobip Shift