Twilio recently had a great day getting funding together, thanks to a very successful round of Series D funding co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures. The company managed to raise fully $70 million from its Series D round, and that gives the company quite a bit of room to run in terms of getting its line of voice, SMS and other tools in place even further than the company has already gone.
So far, the company has raised about $103 million dollars, according to reports from Thomson Reuters, which means that the most recent round of funding raised almost double what the previous rounds pulled in. Originally staked back in 2009 with a series of investors chipping in—including Spreecast's Jeff Fluhr and Lowercase Capital's Chris Sacca, among others—Twilio was looking to announce its funding round on June 12, but got the news dropped for it. Twilio's CEO, Jeff Lawson, further detailed that interest in the newest funding round had been much larger than anticipated. With the announcement came a new member of Twilio's board of directors: Scott Raney, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, who has already been involved with several other technology firms in which Redpoint Ventures has had some investment.
There are likely several good reasons why Twilio's newest round of funding had a lot of attention behind it, as Twilio has already built some impressive new relationships with other companies. For instance, Twilio has already made one connection with Intuit Online Payroll, offering up a two-factor authentication system to keep the payroll processor's systems safer from outside intrusion. A payroll processor needs to keep its data—which can include a variety of sensitive items like Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses and several others—secure above all else, but with Twilio, a new level of security could be brought into play with its phone call and text messaging APIs. Intuit can, thanks to Twilio, send verification codes to phones to help users prove that they are the ones making contact, as opposed to unauthorized users.
It's not just payroll processing, either, as Twilio has also set up cloud-based customer support functions for popular online content provider Hulu, as well as provided services for Airbnb. Box, Shopify, Uber...all of these companies, and others besides, are all putting the Twilio line of products to work. Twilio has also put up a set of major advancements in terms of Web-based real time communications (WebRTC), adding WebRTC functionality to its Twilio Client just days after Google Chrome offered general support for WebRTC. With the newly-augmented Twilio Client, users can take advantage of improved audio quality when making voice calls from a browser.
So, considering how many companies already count Twilio as a valuable part of the lineup, it's really no surprise to see investors interested in getting in—and in a big way—on the latest line of funding for a company that has shown what it can do.
When a company can count several major businesses—and in their respective areas, Hulu, Intuit and Airbnb are all major businesses—as clients, and not just stop with those, it's clear there's value to be had. Twilio is reaping some of the benefits of that value by being an attractive investment, and bringing in plenty of new capital besides.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
