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 | |
| Type of business | Public |
|---|---|
| Traded as | |
| Founded | 2008; 17 years ago (2008) inSeattle, Washington, U.S.[1] |
| Headquarters | Rincon Center San Francisco, California, U.S. |
| Founders |
|
| Key people | |
| Industry | Communications |
| Products | |
| Revenue |  US$4.46 billion (2024) |
| Operating income |  US$–54 million (2024) |
| Net income | US$–109 million (2024) |
| Total assets |  US$9.87 billion (2024) |
| Total equity | US$7.95 billion (2024) |
| Employees | 5,535 (2024) |
| Subsidiaries | |
| URL | twilio |
| ASN | 394434 |
| [3][2] | |
Twilio Inc. is an American cloud communications company based inSan Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receivingphone calls, sending and receivingtext messages, and performing other communication functions using itsweb serviceAPIs.
Twilio was founded in 2008 byUniversity of Michigan graduates[4] Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis[5] and was based initially inSeattle, Washington, and San Francisco, California.[6]
On November 20, 2008, the company launched Twilio Voice, an API to make and receive phone calls completely hosted in the cloud.[7] Twilio's text messaging API was released in February 2010,[8] andSMS shortcodes were released in public beta in July 2011.[9]
Twilio raised approximately $103 million inventure capital growth funding. Twilio received its first round of seed funding in March 2009 for an undisclosed amount fromMitch Kapor,The Founders Fund,Dave McClure, David G. Cohen,Chris Sacca, Manu Kumar, from K9 Ventures, and Jeff Fluhr.[10]
Twilio's first A round of funding was led byUnion Square Ventures for $3.7 million[5] and its second B round of funding, for $12 million, was led byBessemer Venture Partners.[11]
Twilio received $17 million in a Series C round in December 2011 from Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures.[12]
In July 2013 Twilio received another $70 million fromRedpoint Ventures,Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), and Bessemer Venture Partners.[13]
In July 2015, Twilio raised a $130 million Series E fromFidelity,T Rowe Price,Altimeter Capital Management, and Arrowpoint Partners, in addition toAmazon andSalesforce.[14]
Twilio filed forIPO on theNew York Stock Exchange and started trading on June 23, 2016, with a 92% increase on the first day.[15]
In March 2020, Twilio announced the appointment of Steve Pugh as Chief Security Officer and Glenn Weinstein as Chief Customer Officer.[16]
In 2021, Twilio shut down its links toParler due to Parler refusing to agree to monitor hate speech and insurrection on their platform.
On August 4, 2022, an unknown attacker accessed Twilio's internal network through anSMS phishing campaign targeting Twilio's employees. Twilio confirmed the breach three days later, clarifying that it affected only "a limited number" of customer accounts.[17] 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.[18]
In September 2022, Twilio laid off 11% of its workforce.[19] 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".[20][21] The company announced an additional 17% cut in its workforce, nearly 1,500 employees, in February 2023.[22] As a part of restructuring, the company also announced creation of two business units – Twilio Data & Applications and Twilio Communications.[23] In December 2023, Twilio announced a decision to reduce its workforce by 5%, affecting around 300 employees, primarily within its Data and Applications division.[24]
Twilio is known for usingplatform evangelism to acquire customers.[25] An early example isGroupMe, which was founded in May 2010 at thehackathon ofTechCrunch Disrupt and uses Twilio's text messaging product to facilitate group chat.[26] GroupMe raised $10.6 million in venture funding in January 2011.[27]
Following the success of TechCrunch Disrupt,seed accelerator500 Startups (now 500 Global) announced the Twilio Fund, a $250,000 "micro-fund" to provideseed money to startups using Twilio in September 2010.[28][29]
In January 2024, Twilio founder Jeff Lawson stepped down as CEO and board member, succeeded by Khozema Shipchandler.[2] Later that year in July, alleged threat actors acquired the phone numbers of over 33 million users of the company'smulti-factor authentication service "Authy".[30]
In February 2015, Twilio acquired Authy, aY Combinator–backed startup that offerstwo-factor authentication services to end users, developers and enterprises.[31]
In September 2016, Twilio acquired Tikal Technologies, the development team behind the Kurento WebRTC open-source project, for $8.5 million.[32]
In February 2017, Twilio acquired Beepsend, a Swedish-based SMS messaging provider, for an undisclosed amount.[33]
Twilio announced in September 2018 that they were acquiring Ytica, a Prague, Czech Republic–based speech analytics firm, for an undisclosed amount.[34]
In October 2018 Twilio announced they were acquiringSendGrid, a Denver, Colorado-based customer communication platform for transactional and marketing email, for $2 billion.[35] In February 2019, the two companies were formally merged in a deal valued at $3 billion.[36]
In November 2018, the company acquired Core Network Dynamics GmbH, a Berlin, Germany-based virtual evolved packet core company.[37]
Twilio announced in July 2020 that they had acquired Electric Imp, an internet of things platform company, for an undisclosed amount.[38] In October of that year, the company acquired Segment, a platform to collect, clean, and activate customer data, for $3.2 billion.[39]
In May 2021, Twilio acquired Ionic Security, a data security platform for $30.2 million,[40][41] and Zipwhip, a toll-free messaging services provider, for $850 million.[42][43]
In January 2022, Twilio announced that they agreed to acquire Boku Identity, Inc. fromBoku, Inc. for $32.3 million.[44][45]
In October 2025, Twilio announced their agreement to acquire Stytch, an identity platform for AI agents.[46]
Twilio usesAmazon Web Services to host its communication infrastructure via APIs.[47] 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.[48]
Rather than using industry-standard protocols such asSIP for call control, Twilio uses a customizedmarkup language known as TwiML to allow for direct integration with its services.[49] Twilio and the customer typically exchange TwiML documents via HTTPWebhook.
Twilio is known to supportopen 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.[50] One month later, Twilio engineer Kyle Conroy released Stashboard, an open-source status dashboard written in thePython programming language that any API or software service can use to display whether their service is functioning properly.[51]
Twilio also sponsors Localtunnel,[52] created by former engineer Jeff Lindsay, which enables software developers to expose their local development environment to the public Internet from behind aNAT.[53]
Twilio lists several other open-source projects on their website, such as: