Bird, the company that owns the former SparkPost sending infrastructure, has raised $450 million in debt. The announcement on 23 September describes a $400 million term loan and a $50 million revolving credit facility, led by J.P. Morgan with Capital One and Citi as joint lead arrangers. Seven banks took part.
The money is going to shareholders. Bird says the deal “provides liquidity to our shareholders, including current and former employee shareholders, while keeping Bird private and independent”. Bloomberg reports it will fund a dividend. Chief executive Robert Vis confirmed on X that the company stays private and independent. It is a dividend recapitalisation, not a sale and not a funding round.
Bird says it generated $165 million of EBITDA in 2025 with about 120 staff, down from more than 1,000 at its peak. Those figures are the company’s own and unaudited. Computable reported in May that Bird was cutting 34 jobs in Europe and moving most remaining work to the US.
The same release launched Agentic Harness, which gives AI agents direct access to Bird’s infrastructure through an MCP server and a command-line tool. Agents can send and manage email. Bird’s site now lists a Mailbox API described as “a real inbox your code owns”. An agent can be given an address on the customer’s own domain or on a shared domain, inbox.ai.
That shared domain is an interesting challenge. Bird’s announcement does not say who manages the reputation of inbox.ai, what sending limits apply to an agent-owned mailbox, or how abuse from one customer’s agent is kept from affecting another’s. Mailbox providers have been tightening rules on bulk senders. Autonomous agents sending from a shared domain will test how those rules are applied, are they treated similarly to mailboxes at MBP’s or do they get treated as bulk mailers… so many questions.
Bird’s status page recorded US API errors on 17 and 26 September and a processing delay on 18 September blamed on an upstream cloud provider. The separate SparkPost status page, which covers email delivery, logged one incident in the same period: delayed outbound delivery for some US-hosted customers for about an hour on 17 September.
