If you're not familiar with the text messaging space, you may not be familiar with the name Nexmo. On the other hand, Twilio (News - Alert) may ring a bell as it is larger and has been around longer. Still, Nexmo has been steadily building a name for itself, according to Gigaom, among certain developers, messaging apps and e-commerce businesses and may soon become just as big as Twilio.
Put simply, Nexmo bridges IP communications with more traditional services offered by telecommunications companies by way of APIs that act as universal translators. This allows apps to make phone calls or send and receive text messages with relative ease.
Nexmo's Two-Way SMS API, which provides this functionality, is definitely at the heart of its offerings, but it also offers USSD, currently in beta, which enables secure app-to-person SMS.
Nexmo differs slightly from Twilio, however, because while the latter focuses on voice and SMS — the company recently launched SIP from Twilio, allowing it to enter the enterprise voice market — Nexmo has doubled down on texting. Currently, it powers SMS services for some of the world's biggest OTT apps, including Viber, ICQ, Korea's Kakao Talk and Japan's Line. Meanwhile, Nexmo ships SMS confirmations, alerts and booking communications for popular online rental service Airbnb.
With clients such as these, it's no wonder Nexmo is now up to handling 250 million app-to-person messages in a month. Annually, the company handles about two billion SMS transactions but its traffic is growing at a rate of about 20 percent per month, so it will likely far exceed that number by the end of the year. As such, it seems as though Nexmo is cutting into Twilio's share of the SMS space.
That said, Nexmo's developer base of 35,000 is still pretty small in comparison to Twilio's 200,000. Meanwhile, Twilio has its extremely popular voice services supporting it.
Still, it seems that there's room in the market for both Nexmo and Twilio; at the very least, Nexmo's success so far in terms of its customer base and recent funding suggests that it isn't going anywhere.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey