I’m deep into writing a research report on the growing popularity of Telco APIs, but I have to take note of the $12 million in Series B funding that Twilio received from a group of investors led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by Union Square Ventures, 500 Startups and “several prominent angel investors.” It is a real vote of confidence from the venture capital community and reflects the expectation that a significant number of modern mashups are destined to include seamless origination or receipt of phone calls and text messaging.

Since its inception in 2008, Twilio has launched a number of highly visible initiatives to recruit Web developers – both inside and outside enterprise IT groups – into the telecommunications fold. It has succeeded in providing cloud-based telecom infrastructure to support phone apps at eBay, SurveyMonkey (which itself just secured $100 million in debt financing) and Sony Records, among others. It has kept its API simple and prices its services according to an “on demand” model. As a result, it has built a community of over 20,000 registered developers who, in turn, have discovered that they can reliably generate “communications enabled business processes” quickly and relatively inexpensively (when compared to alternative professional services shops and systems integrators).

Twilio is, by no means, alone in the “phone API” business. The mix-and-match world of VoIP, coupled with Web-based phone apps includes search and cloud computing giant Google, Skype (with over 500 million registered users), BT-owned Ribbit and Voxeo, whose cloud-based telephony subsidiary Tropo is the closest thing to a direct competitor. Collectively they are doing an excellent job of recruiting fresh talent into the telephony developer space while scaling up both capacity and features to fill burgeoning demand. Twilio will use the money to scale up and for a variety of new positions.

Categories: Articles

Tags: IP telephony, Recombinant Communications, Telco API, Twilio