Twilio

Twilio (pronounced TWILL-e-o) is a cloud communications (PaaS) company based in San Francisco, California. Twilio allows software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls and send and receive text messages using its web service APIs. Twilio’s services are accessed over HTTP and are billed based on usage.

As of February 2015, more than 560,000 developers use the service.

History

Twilio was founded in 2007 by Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis[2] and was originally based in both Seattle, Washington, and San Francisco, California.

Twilio’s first major press coverage was the result of an application built by Jeff Lawson to Rickroll people, which investor Dave McClure used on TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington as a prank.[4] A few days later the company launched Twilio Voice, an API to make and receive phone calls completely hosted in the cloud.[5] Twilio’s text messaging API was released in February 2010,[6] 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, rumored to be around $250,000,[8] from Mitch Kapor, The Founders Fund, Dave McClure, David G. Cohen, Chris Sacca, Manu Kumar, and Jeff Fluhr.[9] Twilio’s first A round of funding was led by Union Square Ventures for $3.7 million[2] and its second B round of funding was for $12 million was led by Bessemer Venture Partners.[10] Twilio received $17 million in a Series C round in December 2011 from Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures.[11] In July 2013 Twilio received another $70 million from Redpoint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Jeff Lawson Founder, CEO, & Chairman

Jeff is a serial inventor with over 15 years of entrepreneurial and product experience. Prior to co-founding Twilio, Jeff was Founder & CTO of NineStar, Founding CTO of Stubhub.com and Founder, CEO & CTO of Versity. He was also one of the original product managers for Amazon Web Services. At every business, Jeff identified the fundamental need for a platform for developers and companies to easily build communications-based business solutions. Jeff grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, started his first company in middle school, and earned his BS in Computer Science & Film/Video from University of Michigan.