San Francisco-based startup Twilio (News - Alert) fills some interesting gaps in the communications technology arena. The company’s proprietary technology allows phone calling, VoIP and messaging to be literally embedded into Web, desktop and mobile software. It essentially offers a globally available cloud API that developers can use to build more intelligent and complex communications systems, creating their own customized phone system to serve businesses and customers in any way they wish.
The company is certainly attracting attention. Twilio recently announced that is has attracted a $70 million Series D funding round and is moving steadily towards an IPO. The company, which was founded in 2008 by Jeff Lawson (formerly of Stubhub.com and Amazon), Evan Cooke and John Wolthius, was featured in Forbes in 2011 as one of “Eight Hot Startups that Aren’t Household Names…Yet.”
The company may soon jump that barrier. Twilio has already signed deals with more than 1,000 telecom carriers around the world, and with this latest round, Twilio has raised more than $100 million in VC funding and signed up more than 200,000 developers, according to Business Insider. The company is now estimated to be worth about $500 million.
Tech Crunch sums up what developers can do with Twilio’s service: “Let’s say you’re building a service that sends its users a daily text with facts about cats. Between dealing with carriers and SMS gateways, sending texts programatically is… actually pretty challenging. Twilio turns it into a single line of code, in exchange for about 1¢ per text sent or received. For most things a developer could want to do over a phone line — be it SMS, voice calling, or VoIP — Twilio can handle the vast majority of the grunt work with just a few simple API calls.”
CEO Lawson told Tech Crunch he had originally envisioned raising somewhere between $35M and $50M, so the $70 million is an indication of how much interest there is in the company’s technology.
“This represents a multibillion-dollar market opportunity," CEO Jeff Lawson said in a statement announcing the funding round, which is being led by Redpoint Ventures. Prior investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson also participated in the funding round, the company's fourth.
Edited by Alisen Downey