Twilio is a cloud communications platform for building SMS, voice, and messaging applications on an application programming interface (API) built for global use. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and was founded in 2008 by Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis. Notable companies using Twilio are Twitch, ZenDesk, Nordstrom, and Lyft. The company has offices in seventeen locations, including Atlanta, Bangalore, Berlin, Bogota, Denver, Dublin, Paris, Prague, Hong Kong, Irvine, London, Madrid, Munich, Malmo, Mountain View, Redwood City, New York City, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, and Tallinn.
Twilio Flex is Twilio's communication platform as a service (CPaaS) product that is built to be a programmable contact center platform (CCaaS). It is built to be an application platform for contact center development that allows customers to develop, customize, and manage their contact centers on Twilio's infrastructure.
The Flex platform offers users a chance to program the platform to their needs and respond to market conditions through updating workflows, routing rules, channels, integrations, and the user interface design. It supports messaging channels, with intelligent routing and performance tracking. The platform offers business insights for supervisors to understand how reports are generated and managed, and it features dashboards and key performance indicators without using code. The platform is built to monitor performance and offer guidance to agents for contact center management.
The Flex platform also offers integrations with Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Contact Center AI, various messaging platforms, and other certified integrations. As well, the platform can work with Twilio's APIs and integrate those APIs for different use cases, such as pulling in inventory data, customers' past orders, or payments.
The Flex platform offers a few pricing options:
- Per-hour pricing, for $1 per active user hour
- Scaled pricing, based on seasonal traffic or part-time agents
- Flat rate, per-month pricing of $150 per user—be that an agent, supervisor, or administrator— regardless of volume or activity
Twilio's MessagingX is a messaging platform centralized for users to help them engage with customers across the customer's preferred channel. The platform offers APIs and scalable software capable of monitoring over 900 million data points daily for reliability at scale. The MessagingX platform offers a programmable messaging API for the transactional messaging platform and a conversations API, which provides support for customers at critical moments on channels they prefer with multiparty conversations.
Twilio's Voice API offers users connectivity, programmability, and privacy and security features, capable of being integrated into applications, to help users build engaging experiences over voice communications. The API works on global carrier infrastructure with redundancies in over 100 countries; it provides elastic SIP trunking, private connections to the cloud, and real-time access to the raw data of phone calls, for a real-time call quality monitoring tool. Twilio also offers a Voice SDK to embed voice into iOS, Android, or Javascript applications.
Twilio's Video API and SDK is built to allow users to embed video experiences into their applications for Javascript, iOS, and Android on top of a cloud-based, enterprise-grade infrastructure. The API is built to allow users to create bespoke video experience with layouts and virtual backgrounds that work across major browsers and devices.
Twilio Live is an API for building interactive live streaming experiences, including audio and video streaming at scale. The live streaming feature is offered in an API and SDK and can be optimized for iOS, Android, and all major browsers. The interactivity offered by Twilio Live includes text-based chat, audience polls, and the option to invite audience members to speak.
SendGrid is an API for sending email and engaging with customers over email at scale. The API is built to have email delivered in seconds and without interruption, through Twilio's proprietary Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). The intuitive console features an automated queue handling and throttle risk detection. And the SendGrid API offers peering to deliver email to Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Apple.
To help users with their platform and their APIs, Twilio offers professional services, training, and support. Through their professional services, Twilio offers guidance for Twilio's contact center, customer data, messaging, voice, email, and video and live streaming APIs and services to help users integrate the solutions and to develop their platforms to meet their needs.
Timeline
The deal comes on the heels of the company's $3.2 billion acquisition of Segment at the end of last year as it continues to look for ways to expand its markets.
On July 29, 2015 Twilio completed their series E funding round with $130 million in funding from T. Rowe Price (lead investor), Fidelity (lead investor), Salesforce Ventures, DFJ, Bessemer Venture Partners, ArrowMark Partners, Amazon, and Altimeter Capital.
Twilio announced the successful completion of its previously announced acquisition of SendGrid.
On September 11, 2018 Twilio acquired Ytica, a company offering an analytical platform for customer service solutions, for an undisclosed amount if money.
On February 7, 2017 Twilio acquired Beepsend SMS, a company providing SMS connectivity solutions, for an undisclosed amount of money.
On September 20, 2016 Twilio acquired Kurento, an open source software development framework for making media servers, for and undisclosed amount of money.
On February 24, 2015 Twilio acquired Authy, an API for developers to customize user experiences, for an undisclosed amount of money.
Funding Rounds
Acquisitions
Patents
Further Resources
CCaaS vs CPaaS vs SaaS: Is a Contact Center Platform Right for You?
Web
Twilio acquires Beepsend to make message delivery more efficient on its Super Network
Lucas Matney
Web
February 7, 2017
Twilio closes acquisition of email specialist SendGrid in all-stock deal now worth $3B
Ingrid Lunden
Web
February 1, 2019
Twilio named a leader in CPaaS
Web
Twilio's contact center products just got more analytical with Ytica acquisition
Ron Miller
Web
September 11, 2018