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Twilio () is an American company based in
San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
,
California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...
, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving
phone calls A telephone call is a connection over a telephone network between the called party and the calling party. First telephone call The first telephone call was made on March 10, 1876, by Alexander Graham Bell. Bell demonstrated his ability to "ta ...
, sending and receiving
text message Text messaging, or texting, is the act of composing and sending electronic messages, typically consisting of alphabetic and numeric characters, between two or more users of mobile devices, desktops/ laptops, or another type of compatible comput ...
s, 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 originally based in both
Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is a port, seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the county seat, seat of King County, Washington, King County, Washington (state), Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in bo ...
, and
San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
,
California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...
. Twilio's first major press coverage, in November 2008, was the result of an application built by Jeff Lawson to
rickroll Rickrolling or a Rickroll is an internet meme involving the unexpected appearance of the music video for the 1987 song "Never Gonna Give You Up", performed by the English singer Rick Astley. The video has over 1 billion views on YouTube. The m ...
people, which investor
Dave McClure David "Dave" McClure is an entrepreneur and angel investor based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who founded the business accelerator 500 Startups (now 500 Global), serving as CEO until his resignation in 2017. He founded Practical Venture Capita ...
used on
TechCrunch TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare. In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately ...
founder and editor
Michael Arrington J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970) is the American founder and former co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in America and elsewhere. Magazines such as ...
as a prank. A few days later, 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 Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...
growth funding. Twilio received its first round of seed funding in March 2009 for an undisclosed amount from Mitch Kapor,
The Founders Fund Founders Fund is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. Formed in 2005, Founders Fund had more than $11 billion in aggregate capital under management as of 2022. The firm invests across all stages and sectors, including aerospace, artifici ...
,
Dave McClure David "Dave" McClure is an entrepreneur and angel investor based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who founded the business accelerator 500 Startups (now 500 Global), serving as CEO until his resignation in 2017. He founded Practical Venture Capita ...
, David G. Cohen,
Chris Sacca Christopher Sacca (born May 12, 1975) is an American venture investor, company advisor, entrepreneur, and lawyer. He is the proprietor of Lowercase Capital, a venture capital fund in the United States that has invested in seed and early-stage te ...
, Manu Kumar, from K9 Ventures and Jeff Fluhr. Twilio's first A round of funding was led by
Union Square Ventures Union Square Ventures (USV) is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. The firm has backed more than 130 startups, including Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Coinbase, Zynga, Tumblr, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Kickstarter, MongoDB, Flurry, ...
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 Redpoint Ventures is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in seed, early and growth-stage companies. History The firm was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with offices in San Francisco, Los Ange ...
,
Draper Fisher Jurvetson Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in enterprise, consumer and disruptive technologies. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth ...
(DFJ) and Bessemer Venture Partners. In July 2015, Twilio raised a $130 million Series E from
Fidelity Fidelity is the quality of faithfulness or loyalty. Its original meaning regarded duty in a broader sense than the related concept of ''fealty''. Both derive from the Latin word ''fidēlis'', meaning "faithful or loyal". In the City of London f ...
,
T Rowe Price T. Rowe Price Group, Inc. is an American publicly owned global investment management firm that offers funds, subadvisory services, separate account management, and retirement plans and services for individuals, institutions, and financial inter ...
,
Altimeter Capital Altimeter Capital is an American investment firm based in Boston, Massachusetts and Menlo Park, California. The firm focuses on technology investments in both public and private markets globally. Background In 2008, Brad Gerstner founded Alt ...
Management, and Arrowpoint Partners, in addition to
Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...
and
Salesforce Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...
. Twilio filed for
IPO An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...
() 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. On August 4, 2022, an unknown attacker gained access to 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 In signal processing, a signal is a function that conveys information about a phenomenon. Any quantity that can vary over space or time can be used as a signal to share messages between observers. The '' IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing' ...
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, CEO Jeff Lawson claimed decisions of which employees to lay off were made through an "anti-racist/anti-oppression lens."


Reception

Twilio is known for its use of
platform evangelism Platform evangelism (also called developer relations, developer and platform evangelism, developer advocacy, or API evangelism) is the application of technology evangelism to a multi-sided platform. It seeks to accelerate the growth of a platform' ...
to acquire customers. An early example is
GroupMe GroupMe is a mobile group messaging app owned by Microsoft. It was launched in May 2010 by the private company GroupMe. In August 2011, GroupMe delivered over 100 million messages each month and by June 2012, that number jumped to 550 million. I ...
, which was founded in May 2010 at the TechCrunch Disrupt
hackathon A hackathon (also known as a hack day, hackfest, datathon or codefest; a portmanteau of hacking and marathon) is an event where people engage in rapid and collaborative engineering over a relatively short period of time such as 24 or 48 hours. Th ...
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 Startup accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are fixed-term, cohort-based programs, that include mentorship and educational components and culminate in a public pitch event or demo day. While traditional business incubators are often g ...
500 Startups 500 Global (previously 500 Startups) is an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator founded in 2010 by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai. The fund admitted a first "class" of twelve startups to its incubator office in Mountain View, California ...
(now 500 Global) announced the Twilio Fund, a $250,000 "micro-fund" to provide
seed money Seed money, sometimes known as seed funding or seed capital, is a form of securities offering in which an investor invests capital in a startup company in exchange for an equity stake or convertible note stake in the company. The term ''seed'' ...
to startups using Twilio in September 2010.


Acquisitions

In February 2015, Twilio acquired Authy, a
Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, St ...
-backed startup that offers
two-factor authentication Multi-factor authentication (MFA; encompassing two-factor authentication, or 2FA, along with similar terms) is an electronic authentication method in which a user is granted access to a website or application only after successfully presenting ...
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. In September 2018, Twilio announced they were acquiring Ytica, a Prague, Czech Republic-based speech analytics firm, for an undisclosed amount. In October 2018, Twilio announced they were acquiring
SendGrid SendGrid (also known as Twilio SendGrid) is a Denver, Colorado-based customer communication platform for transactional and marketing email. The company was founded by Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins in 2009, and incubated through the ...
, 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, Twilio acquired Core Network Dynamics GmbH, a Berlin, Germany-based virtual evolved packet core company. In July 2020, Twilio announced they had acquired Electric Imp, an internet of things platform company, for an undisclosed amount. In October of that year, Twilio acquired Segment, a platform to collect, clean, and activate customer data, for $3.2 billion. In May 2021, Twilio announced that they were acquiring Ionic Security, a data security platform for $30.2 million, and Zipwhip, a toll-free messaging services provider, for $850 million.


Technology

Twilio uses
Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...
to host its communication infrastructure via APIs. Twilio follows a set of 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 Markup language refers to a text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship between its parts. Markup is often used to control the display of the document ...
known as TwIML to allow for direct integration with its services. Twilio and the customer typically exchange TwIML documents via HTTP
Webhook A webhook in web development is a method of augmenting or altering the behavior of a web page or web application with custom callbacks. These callbacks may be maintained, modified, and managed by third-party users and developers who may not necess ...
.


Open-source contributions

Twilio is known to support the development of
open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...
. 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 Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. Python is dynamically-typed and garbage-collected. It supports multiple programming p ...
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 Nat or NAT may refer to: Computing * Network address translation (NAT), in computer networking Organizations * National Actors Theatre, New York City, U.S. * National AIDS trust, a British charity * National Archives of Thailand * National As ...
. Twilio lists a number of other open-source projects on their website, such as: * Flask Restful: Python
Flask (web framework) Flask is a micro web framework written in Python. It is classified as a microframework because it does not require particular tools or libraries. It has no database abstraction layer, form validation, or any other components where pre-existing t ...
to build REST APIs. * Shadow: Runs requests through a release candidate with real production traffic. * Banker’s Box: Wrapper for storage backend.


See also

*
Infobip Infobip provides full-stack communications platform-as-a-service with a global reach across six continents. Services include omnichannel communications, contact center, chatbot, customer engagement and customer data platforms as well as identity ...
*
Matrix (protocol) Matrix is an open standard and communication protocol for real-time communication. It aims to make real-time communication work seamlessly between different service providers, in the way that standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol email current ...
*
Textlocal Textlocal is a mobile communications company founded in 2005 with offices based in Malvern and Chester. In 2005, Alastair Shortland and Darren Daws decided they wanted to transform the way businesses, individuals and groups communicate using m ...
*
TextMagic TextMagic is a SaaS-based A2P messaging service that allows SMBs to connect with their customers via two-way SMS messages, online texts, gateway SMS via email, SMS software for desktop, and SMS distribution lists. TextMagic is operated by Text ...
*
Trumpia Trumpia is an American SaaS text messaging and marketing automation company. It specializes in SMS marketing and multi-channel automated messaging. Trumpia’s services are designed for marketing, internal communications, customer service, and ot ...
*
Unified communications Unified communications (UC) is a business and marketing concept describing the integration of enterprise communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, voice (including IP telephony), mobility features (including e ...


References


External links

* * {{Authority control 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