2025 was a defining year for the Swedish CMS company Playipp: the integration of Databeat, reaching 4,000+ Nordic customers, and a clear shift toward vertical expertise. In his Year in Review, CEO Henrik Mazzanti shares why business-critical communication now demands more than features.
Year in Review 2025/2026: Henrik Mazzanti | Playipp
2025 marked a significant year for Playipp. Following our acquisition of Norwegian company Databeat in summer 2024, we successfully integrated their customer base onto our platform. The integration accelerated our growth in Norway while reinforcing our commitment to serving organizations where communication is business critical. We’re now serving over 4,000 businesses across the Nordics, making solid progress on building scalable growth in sales and marketing, accelerating upsales within our existing customer base, and becoming increasingly data-driven.
One key focus has been strengthening our partner ecosystem, we’ve invested significantly in partner enablement and building deeper relationships with partners who understand their customers’ needs.
We’ve continued developing our platform with focus on user experience, driving the usability and stickiness that keeps customers engaged. Equally important, we’ve built out our customer success function to ensure organizations achieve their communication objectives.
What we’ve learned: customers want more than technology
As we’ve grown, one pattern has become clear: today’s buyers have fundamentally different expectations than three years ago. They’re no longer shopping for a digital signage system with a feature list. They’re looking for a partner who understands their specific challenges.
When an HR or Communications Manager evaluates digital signage, they’re thinking about employee engagement, reaching all employees regardless of location, improving eNPS scores, and ensuring business-critical information reaches everyone.
When a Manufacturing Operations Manager considers the technology, they’re focused on shift changeovers, safety compliance, and reaching deskless workers.
When a municipality evaluates screens for citizen information, their concerns are accessibility, multilingual support, and service quality.
These aren’t variations of the same problem. They’re fundamentally different use cases demanding different expertise, integrations, and success metrics.
The shift toward vertical expertise
The digital signage market is maturing. Buyers are becoming more sophisticated, and their evaluation criteria are shifting from “what can your platform do?” to “do you understand my industry well enough to help me succeed?”
This doesn’t mean generic platforms are obsolete, but undifferentiated positioning is becoming a liability. The vendors thriving in the future speak to specific industry challenges, have built integrations with the systems their customers actually use, and have developed domain expertise beyond technical features.This is where partners become invaluable. Our partner network includes experts who bring deep industry knowledge and credibility that strengthens our combined offering. Digital signage is following the same trajectory we’ve seen in enterprise SaaS, where vertical specialization drives better customer outcomes and sustainable growth.
Playipp’s positioning: verticalization through deep industry understanding
We’ve made a strategic choice: Playipp focuses on serving organizations that need to own and control their communication. Whether it’s reaching employees, visitors, patients, customers, or citizens: we work with organizations where effective communication drives real business outcomes.
Our customer base spans corporate communications, manufacturing, logistics, and public organizations. What unites these diverse sectors isn’t the industry. It’s the approach. These sectors share the need to control and communicate their messaging effectively, require reliable systems that integrate seamlessly with their existing infrastructure, and measure success in employee satisfaction, organizational alignment, operational efficiency, and trust.
Looking ahead: the path forward
As we look toward 2026, we’re preparing for European expansion, building out our partner network and deepening our vertical expertise across our core sectors. Internally, AI is already transforming how we work. It’s accelerating our development through more efficient coding and testing, allowing us to move faster and deliver value to customers more quickly.
When it comes to AI in our solution, we’re taking a deliberately user-centric approach. AI features are on our roadmap, but we’re developing them through close collaboration with customers, ensuring we solve real challenges rather than adding technology for technology’s sake. Our entire development philosophy centers on involving users in the process and AI will be no different.
The broader lesson for the industry is clear: “flexible for any use case” is no longer compelling. Buyers want partners who understand their world and not vendors who claim to understand everyone’s world. The digital signage market is maturing, and the question isn’t whether to specialize, it’s which specialization aligns with your strengths.
For Playipp, our focus remains on serving organizations that need business-critical communication solutions, with the integrations, reliability, and functionality their sectors demand. We’re excited about what this focused, customer-driven execution will enable ahead.
