Twilio
Headquarters
San Francisco, CAFounded
2008CEO / Founder
Khozema ShipchandlerEmployees
5001-10000Funding
PublicStock
TWLOProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
7.8/10Website
www.twilio.com
Profile updated
About Twilio
Twilio is a cloud communications company headquartered in San Francisco, California, founded in 2008 by Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis. The company provides a suite of programmable communication APIs that allow developers to embed messaging, voice, video, and email capabilities into applications. Twilio went public on the New York Stock Exchange in June 2016 under the ticker TWLO.
Twilio's core products include Programmable Messaging, Programmable Voice, SendGrid (email delivery), and Flex, a cloud-based contact center platform. In 2020, Twilio acquired Segment, a customer data platform (CDP) that collects and unifies customer event data from web, mobile, and server-side sources. Segment serves as the data layer for Twilio's broader customer engagement offerings. Notable customers across Twilio's products have included Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft.
Twilio raised approximately $240 million across multiple funding rounds before its 2016 IPO. The company acquired SendGrid in 2019 for approximately $2 billion and acquired Segment in 2020 for approximately $3.2 billion in stock. Following a period of rapid headcount growth, Twilio conducted significant layoffs in 2022 and 2023, reducing its workforce by roughly 30% over that period. Khozema Shipchandler became CEO in January 2024, succeeding co-founder Jeff Lawson.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Twilio
All products by Twilio reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Twilio
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Twilio's product on their own terms. They disagreed by 3.8 points — The Skeptic was the hardest to convince, The Decision Maker the most positive.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Twilio competes with, and how they differ.
Ericsson-owned CPaaS rival selling the same programmable voice, SMS and video APIs, but pairs them with packaged UCaaS and contact-center suites and leans on bundled enterprise deals more than pure usage-based pricing.
Stockholm-based CPaaS provider running its own carrier super-network for SMS and voice at aggressive volume pricing; its Mailgun and Mailjet units compete directly with Twilio SendGrid in email APIs.
Owns and operates a private global IP network instead of reselling carrier capacity, pitching lower per-message and per-minute rates with direct carrier-grade quality for the same voice, messaging and phone number APIs.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Competes on the customer-engagement layer against Twilio Engage and Segment: a packaged cross-channel campaign platform (push, in-app, email, SMS) sold to marketing teams rather than developer-first API building blocks.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Overlaps with Twilio SendGrid and Engage in email and SMS marketing automation for B2C ecommerce brands, selling per-contact subscriptions with built-in customer profiles instead of per-message API usage.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in Twilio's history, with sources.
- Milestone
Khozema Shipchandler named CEO as Jeff Lawson steps down
Co-founder Jeff Lawson left the CEO role and the board amid activist investor pressure; communications president Khozema Shipchandler took over.
cnbc.com - Launch
Debuted CustomerAI
Ahead of SIGNAL 2023, Twilio introduced CustomerAI, coupling large language models with Segment customer data across its engagement platform.
businesswire.com - Acquisition
Completed $3.2B acquisition of Segment
Twilio closed its all-stock purchase of the market-leading customer data platform, which became a division of Twilio.
twilio.com - Acquisition
Completed acquisition of SendGrid
The all-stock deal for the leading email API platform, announced at about $2B in October 2018, was worth roughly $3B at close.
twilio.com - Milestone
IPO on the NYSE at $15 per share
Twilio listed as TWLO, raising $150M on 10 million shares; the stock closed its first day at $28.79, up roughly 90%.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Series E — $130M led by Fidelity and T. Rowe Price
The pre-IPO round added Altimeter Capital and Arrowpoint Partners plus strategic investors Amazon.com and Salesforce Ventures.
techcrunch.com - Acquisition
Acquired Authy
Twilio bought two-factor authentication service Authy, its first acquisition, adding phone verification and 2FA APIs to the platform.
techcrunch.com - Launch
Twilio Voice API public debut
TechCrunch covered the launch of the company's first product, a cloud API for making and receiving phone calls in a few lines of code.
techcrunch.com - Founded
Founded in San Francisco
Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke and John Wolthuis founded Twilio to let developers embed telephony in software through pay-as-you-go APIs.
en.wikipedia.org
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