Twilio

Twilio sells programmable communications through APIs, so developers can build SMS, voice, video, email and authentication into their applications and pay as usage grows. Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke and John Wolthuis founded the company in 2008. All three were University of Michigan graduates, and the company started in Seattle before settling in San Francisco, where it is headquartered at Rincon Center. Khozema Shipchandler became CEO in January 2024. The IPO prospectus counted more than 28,000 Active Customer Accounts as of March 31, 2016.

The company's first outside money was a March 2009 seed round from Mitch Kapor, Founders Fund, Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures and other angels. Union Square Ventures led a $3.7 million Series A. Bessemer Venture Partners provided a $12 million Series B, and Bessemer and Union Square Ventures put in a $17 million Series C in December 2011. In July 2013 Redpoint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Bessemer invested $70 million in a Series D. In July 2015 a $130 million Series E came from Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Altimeter Capital Management and Arrowpoint Partners, with Amazon and Salesforce also investing. Together the disclosed rounds from Series A to Series E total about $233 million. The IPO prospectus lists entities affiliated with Bessemer (28.5 percent), Union Square Ventures (13.6 percent) and Fidelity (6.1 percent) as 5 percent holders before the offering.

Twilio priced its IPO on June 23, 2016 at $15.00 per share, selling 10,000,000 Class A shares for $150 million in gross proceeds on the New York Stock Exchange under TWLO. The stock rose 92 percent on its first trading day. In the prospectus Twilio reported revenue of $49.9 million in 2013, $88.8 million in 2014 and $166.9 million in 2015, with a 2015 net loss of $35.5 million. As a public company it acquired Authy in 2015, then bought SendGrid in 2019 in a deal valued at about $3 billion and Segment in 2020 for $3.2 billion. For 2025 Twilio reported revenue of $5.07 billion and net income of $33.8 million, with 5,587 employees.

Twilio is an example of a developer platform built on usage pricing that went from a seed round to a public listing in about seven years. Union Square Ventures and Bessemer entered at the Series A and Series B, when round sizes were in the low tens of millions, and still held 13.6 percent and 28.5 percent going into the IPO. Crossover investors such as Fidelity and T. Rowe Price joined in the final private round a year before listing. That sequence, early venture lead followed by public market mutual funds just before the IPO, became common in software listings after 2015. The company did not turn a GAAP profit until well after listing, and its 2025 net income was small relative to revenue.