Twilio

Twilio was founded in 2008 by University of Michigan graduates Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis and was based initially in Seattle, Washington, and San Francisco, California. On November 20, 2008, the company launched Twilio Voice, an API to make and receive phone calls completely hosted in the cloud. Twilio's text messaging API was released in February 2010, and SMS shortcodes were released in public beta in July 2011.

Twilio is known for using platform evangelism to acquire customers. An early example is GroupMe, which was founded in May 2010 at the hackathon of TechCrunch Disrupt and uses Twilio's text messaging product to facilitate group chat. GroupMe raised $10.6 million in venture funding in January 2011. Seed accelerator 500 Startups (now 500 Global) announced the Twilio Fund, a $250,000 "micro-fund" to provide seed money to startups using Twilio in September 2010.

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 from Mitch Kapor, The Founders Fund, Dave McClure, David G. Cohen, Chris Sacca, Manu Kumar, from K9 Ventures, and Jeff Fluhr. Twilio's first A round of funding was led by Union Square Ventures for $3.7 million and its second B round of funding, for $12 million, was led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Twilio received $17 million in a Series C round in December 2011 from Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures. In July 2013 Twilio received another $70 million from Redpoint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), and Bessemer Venture Partners. In July 2015, Twilio raised a $130 million Series E from Fidelity, T Rowe Price, Altimeter Capital Management, and Arrowpoint Partners, in addition to Amazon and Salesforce. Twilio's initial public offering took place on the New York Stock Exchange on June 23, 2016, with a 92% increase in share price on the first day.

In March 2020, Twilio announced the appointment of Steve Pugh as Chief Security Officer and Glenn Weinstein as Chief Customer Officer. In 2021, Twilio shut down its links to Parler due to Parler refusing to agree to monitor hate speech and insurrection on its platform.

In September 2022, Twilio laid off 11% of its workforce. The company announced an additional 17% cut in its workforce, nearly 1,500 employees, in February 2023. As a part of restructuring, the company also announced creation of two business units – Twilio Data & Applications and Twilio Communications. In December 2023, Twilio announced a decision to reduce its workforce by 5%.

Twilio founder Jeff Lawson stepped down as CEO and board member in January 2024 and was succeeded by Khozema Shipchandler.

Twilio uses Amazon Web Services to host its communication infrastructure via APIs. Rather than using industry-standard protocols such as SIP for call control, Twilio uses a customized markup language known as TwiML to allow for direct integration with its services. Twilio and the customer typically exchange TwiML documents via HTTP Webhook.

In June 2010, Twilio launched OpenVBX, an open-source product that lets business users configure phone numbers to receive and route phone calls. One month later, Twilio engineer Kyle Conroy released Stashboard, an open-source status dashboard written in the Python programming language that any API or software service can use to display whether their service is functioning properly.

In February 2015, Twilio acquired Authy, a Y Combinator–backed startup that offers two-factor authentication (2FA) services to end users, developers and enterprises.

The company acquired Tikal Technologies, the development team behind the Kurento WebRTC open-source media server software, for $8.5 million in September 2016.

In February 2017, Twilio acquired Beepsend, a Swedish-based SMS messaging provider, for an undisclosed amount. Twilio acquired the Clef 2FA application in March 2017, after which Clef was discontinued and some of its employees were reassigned to Authy products.

Twilio announced in September 2018 that it was acquiring Ytica, a Prague, Czech Republic–based speech analytics firm, for an undisclosed amount. In October of that year, Twilio announced it was acquiring SendGrid, a Denver, Colorado-based customer communication platform for transactional and marketing email, for $2 billion. In February 2019, the two companies were formally merged in a deal valued at $3 billion. In November 2018, the company acquired Core Network Dynamics GmbH, a Berlin, Germany-based virtual evolved packet core company.

Security incidents

On August 4, 2022, attackers accessed Twilio's internal network through an SMS phishing campaign targeting Twilio's employees. Twilio confirmed the data breach three days later. On August 15, Signal – which used Twilio for phone number validation – announced that it had been impacted by the breach, indicating that the affected customers included enterprise accounts. The hackers obtained the data of 209 Twilio customers and compromised 93 accounts on Authy, Twilio's 2FA service, while registering their own devices to the accounts. In October of that year, Twilio disclosed that it had suffered an earlier data breach in June 2022, after a Twilio employee was tricked into revealing their access credentials in a voice phishing attack; Twilio stated that the attacker gained access to customer data for less than 12 hours.

In a July 2024 data breach, the ShinyHunters hacker group used an unsecured Twilio API to acquire the phone numbers of over 33 million Authy users.