Twilio

Twilio Inc. is an American cloud communications company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using its web service APIs.

History

Twilio was founded in 2008 by Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis and was based initially in Seattle, Washington, and San Francisco, California.

On November 20, 2008, the company launched Twilio Voice, an API to make and receive phone calls completely hosted in the cloud. Twilio's text messaging API was released in February 2010, and SMS shortcodes were released in public beta in July 2011.

Twilio raised approximately $103 million in venture capital growth funding. Twilio received its first round of seed funding in March 2009 for an undisclosed amount from Mitch Kapor, The Founders Fund, Dave McClure, David G. Cohen, Chris Sacca, Manu Kumar, from K9 Ventures, and Jeff Fluhr.

Twilio's first A round of funding was led by Union Square Ventures for $3.7 million and its second B round of funding, for $12 million, was led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

Twilio received $17 million in a Series C round in December 2011 from Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures.

In July 2013 Twilio received another $70 million from Redpoint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), and Bessemer Venture Partners.

In July 2015, Twilio raised a $130 million Series E from Fidelity, T Rowe Price, Altimeter Capital Management, and Arrowpoint Partners, in addition to Amazon and Salesforce.

Twilio filed for IPO on the New York Stock Exchange and started trading on June 23, 2016, with a 92% increase on the first day.

In March 2020, Twilio announced the appointment of Steve Pugh as Chief Security Officer and Glenn Weinstein as Chief Customer Officer.

In 2020-2021, Twilio participated in shutting down Parler for Parler not agreeing to monitor hate speech and insurrection on the Parler platform.

On August 4, 2022, an unknown attacker accessed Twilio's internal network through an SMS phishing campaign targeting Twilio's employees. Twilio confirmed the breach three days later, clarifying that it affected only "a limited number" of customer accounts. On August 15, Signal announced that it had been affected by the breach, indicating that the 125 customers affected included at least some enterprise accounts.

In September 2022, Twilio laid off 11% of its workforce to become profitable. In the company announcement, former CEO Jeff Lawson claimed that the decisions (on which employees to lay off) were made through an "anti-racist/anti-oppression lens". The company announced an additional 17% cut in its workforce, nearly 1,500 employees, in February 2023. As a part of restructuring, the company also announced creation of two business unitsTwilio Data & Applications and Twilio Communications. In December 2023, Twilio announced its decision to reduce its workforce by 5%, affecting around 300 employees, primarily within its Data and Applications division.

Twilio is known for using platform evangelism to acquire customers. An early example is GroupMe, which was founded in May 2010 at the hackathon of TechCrunch Disrupt and uses Twilio's text messaging product to facilitate group chat. GroupMe raised $10.6 million in venture funding in January 2011.

Following the success of TechCrunch Disrupt, seed accelerator 500 Startups (now 500 Global) announced the Twilio Fund, a $250,000 "micro-fund" to provide seed money to startups using Twilio in September 2010.

In January 2024, Twilio founder Jeff Lawson stepped down as CEO and board member and was replaced by Khozema Shipchandler as CEO. Later that year in July, alleged threat actors acquired the phone numbers of over 33 million users of the company's multi-factor authentication service "Authy".

As of January 2025, Twilio’s stock surged by 20%, indicating potential signs of recovery and renewed investor confidence.

Acquisitions

In February 2015, Twilio acquired Authy, a Y Combinator–backed startup that offers two-factor authentication services to end users, developers and enterprises.

In September 2016, Twilio acquired Tikal Technologies, the development team behind the Kurento WebRTC open-source project, for $8.5 million.

In February 2017, Twilio acquired Beepsend, a Swedish-based SMS messaging provider, for an undisclosed amount.

Twilio announced in September 2018 that they were acquiring Ytica, a Prague, Czech Republic–based speech analytics firm, for an undisclosed amount.

In October 2018 of that same year Twilio announced they were acquiring SendGrid, a Denver, Colorado-based customer communication platform for transactional and marketing email, for $2 billion. In February 2019, the two companies were formally merged in a deal valued at $3 billion.

In November 2018, the company acquired Core Network Dynamics GmbH, a Berlin, Germany-based virtual evolved packet core company.

Twilio announced in July 2020 that they had acquired Electric Imp, an internet of things platform company, for an undisclosed amount. In October of that year, the company acquired Segment, a platform to collect, clean, and activate customer data, for $3.2 billion.

In May 2021, Twilio acquired Ionic Security, a data security platform for $30.2 million, and Zipwhip, a toll-free messaging services provider, for $850 million.

In January 2022, Twilio announced that they agreed to acquire Boku Identity, Inc. from Boku, Inc. for $32.3 million.

Technology

Twilio uses Amazon Web Services to host its communication infrastructure via APIs. Twilio follows specific architectural design principles to protect against unexpected outages and received praise for staying online during the widespread Amazon Web Services outage in April 2011.

Rather than using industry-standard protocols such as SIP for call control, Twilio uses a customized markup language known as TwiML to allow for direct integration with its services. Twilio and the customer typically exchange TwiML documents via HTTP Webhook.

Open-source contributions

Twilio is known to support open source software development. In June 2010, Twilio launched OpenVBX, an open-source product that lets business users configure phone numbers to receive and route phone calls. One month later, Twilio engineer Kyle Conroy released Stashboard, an open-source status dashboard written in the Python programming language that any API or software service can use to display whether their service is functioning properly.

Twilio also sponsors Localtunnel, created by former engineer Jeff Lindsay, which enables software developers to expose their local development environment to the public Internet from behind a NAT.

Twilio lists several other open-source projects on their website, such as:
* Flask Restful: Python Flask (web framework) to build REST APIs.
* Shadow: Runs requests through a release candidate with real production traffic.
* Banker's Box: Wrapper for storage backend.

See also

* Clef (app)

References

External links

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Cloud computing providers
American companies established in 2008
Computer companies established in 2008
Telecommunications companies established in 2008
Companies based in San Francisco
Cloud communication platforms
Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange
500 Startups companies
2016 initial public offerings
Information technology companies of the United States
2008 establishments in Washington (state)