The story
Founded by Jeff Lawson in 2008.1
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.
From Wikipedia’s article on Twilio, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7