6 ms·

Twilio Raises $17 Million Series C To Expand Abroad

95 points by coloneltcb 15y ago

citricsquid 15y ago
"We’re in the UK and will be rolling out to the rest of Europe in the next couple months.”" Their move to the UK was very half-assed, still no SMS support for the UK... :( I hope they fix that with this new funding before they expand elsewhere.
- dmor 15y ago
  Twilio UK SMS is in rolling beta right now. Please feel free to email me at danielle(at)twilio(dot)com and I'll do what I can to get you added, the queue is quite long so if you applied and haven't gotten that might be why. We are definitely aware of the extremely high demand for this service, not just in the UK but across Europe and beyond, and our engineers are working around the clock to get it out the door and in your hands at the level of quality and reliability our customers have come to expect from Twilio.
  - bilalhusain 15y ago
    Are there any plans for India? The current pricing is too expensive. Thanks for free $10 for trial though.
    - dmor 15y ago
      Right now the only plans I can share are those announced for expanding into Europe, but we're dedicated to bringing Twilio to developers worldwide.
- pclark 15y ago
  We use http://nexmo.com/ http://nexmo.com/ and have been very impressed.
  - aysar 15y ago
    What differentiates them to Twilio and Tropo?
    - pclark 15y ago
      Cheaper, more reliable (we tried both the above), delivery receipts, works in almost every country. If you just want the USA, Twilio is acceptable - I think Twilio crushes it at things other than their SMS gateway though.
rachelp 15y ago
Congratulations Twilio!
kennethologist 15y ago
Twilio should take some of the money and invest it in allowing customers to send SMS internationally. There Beta has to been going on for at least 2 months?? Please Twilio. Thank you.
- dmor 15y ago
  Roger that!
yardie 15y ago
Is it possible to sign up for the beta for other european countries? I only see the UK listed.
- dmor 15y ago
  Yes, if you do not see the country you want on the site just drop us a note at help(at)twilio(dot)com and we will add you to our internal list.
axiom 15y ago
When are they going to get SMS enabled numbers in Canada? I know it's a drop in the bucket, but I will immediately switch over $10k/month in business to them as soon as they do that. The other providers are disastrously bad (yes, that includes Tropo.)
- reso 15y ago
  A thousand times this. One of my projects is SMS heavy, and I had to switch it to Tropo because Twilio wouldn't do Canadian numbers. The developer experience has been far inferior.
  - axiom 15y ago
    The developer experience isn't even the worst of it. Try running some reliability testing. It's mind blowing how bad Tropo is and how many random hidden variables exist in their system.
    - toomuchtodo 15y ago
      Which is really sad when you consider the problem. API accepts SMS and inserts into database; workers take queue from database and action against SMS gateways (works in reverse for messages going the other way). How can this be that difficult to do?
  - pmala 15y ago
    send me mail at patrick(at)twilio(dot)com happy to get you access to the ongoing canadian SMS beta
    - yogione 15y ago
      how about MMS ? ability to send images.
- thedangler 15y ago
  I'm with you on this one. I've been sitting on the fence for almost a year now. I mean if tropo can do it im sure they can too.
johnbender 15y ago
I was lucky enough to sit next to Evan (CTO) at a recent conference dinner and he took the time to explain some of the complex relationships they have, or are developing, with international telcos. From our conversation it seems that most of the issues in the complaints here stem from the difficulty of setting up those relationships and the cost associated with using the existing infrastructure. I'm not sure if anyone from Twilio can comment but maybe someone with some relevant experience can.
christo16 15y ago
It's a good service, but unless they bring prices way down, some big provider (Cough Amazon..) is going to come in and eat their lunch. Granted they probably wouldn't offer the level of detailed APIs that Twillio does. We started using them for SMS sending but went with Nexmo at a fraction of the cost.
- toomuchtodo 15y ago
  I believe their exit strategy is to be acquired by Amazon or someone of their scale. They drive their entire platform on Amazon AWS and the Rackspace cloud system, and Jeff (one of the Twilio co-founders) was previously the product manager for AWS. I went to both Twiliocon and interviewed with Twilio. They're very smart guys, but the problem is that its a race to the bottom. Their idea is innovative (webapps <-> telco integration), but anyone can do it once they learn how to handle the SMS messages between the web and the carrier gateways, as well as how to handle call flows with Asterisk or Freeswitch. Also, to me, it appears they're swimming upstream. Everyone else is moving towards unlimited voice/sms, while they're trying to stick to per minute/per sms rates (even for their VoIP offering!). Awesome idea, excellent execution, not a long term business model.
- aysar 15y ago
  How is Nexmo compared to Tropo?
rjj 15y ago
What are common use cases for Twilio? I've perused the site and understand the functionality but don't see where such high demand is coming from. A few people are commenting here that they use it to send SMS, which makes sense, but I'm having trouble conceptualizing large use cases besides text/call user for confirmation of some action or sending a large alert to many users. My mental summary keeps coming back to "push notifications without an app installed and to any phone". (I'm not implying that's insignificant.) Is that off base?
- ryanhuff 15y ago
  Its phone infrastructure in the cloud, which provides dead-simple server-side integration. They provide the telephone infrastructure, so you can focus on your application. This might include IVR style applications, SMS, voice mail, etc. If you use Rails, try out @stevegraham's twilio-rb gem.
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  Conference calling, notifying large numbers of people by phone quickly, menu trees, etc.
- agildehaus 15y ago
  It's difficult to enter the world of telecom IVR, the barrier of entry is very high, and to do anything at a large scale requires a large up-front investment. Twilio makes telecom IVR as simple as writing a web application, and they're very affordable with no up-front costs. I've written custom emergency notification systems, call-in contests, intelligent call forwarding systems (you could replicate Google Voice). Any phone app you can think of can be constructed.
  - rebel19 15y ago
    Twillio is great for getting a small app out the door. But if you need to scale it and get any advanced form of call control it doesn't support it. It also is a lot more difficult to move away from it if you need to scale out and use other systems. With Tropo you can integrate it with Adhearsion and then as you need to scale move it to Rayo or Asterisk......and you also are not limited to the currently supported countries with Either offering. Tropo allows you to set up your own endpoint in a country they don't support and will integrate that in. So if you are in a South American country, or any place that Twillio doesn't support it is the only game in town.
agildehaus 15y ago
Expanding internationally is a wonderful thing, Twilio will go far if they bring their wonderful API to many countries. I just hope they take some of that investment and bring basic voice recognition to their product, and perhaps some more TTS voices (some Loquendo voices would be grand!).

95 points by coloneltcb 15y ago

"We’re in the UK and will be rolling out to the rest of Europe in the next couple months.”" Their move to the UK was very half-assed, still no SMS support for the UK... :( I hope they fix that with this new funding before they expand elsewhere.

dmor 15y ago
Twilio UK SMS is in rolling beta right now. Please feel free to email me at danielle(at)twilio(dot)com and I'll do what I can to get you added, the queue is quite long so if you applied and haven't gotten that might be why. We are definitely aware of the extremely high demand for this service, not just in the UK but across Europe and beyond, and our engineers are working around the clock to get it out the door and in your hands at the level of quality and reliability our customers have come to expect from Twilio.
- bilalhusain 15y ago
  Are there any plans for India? The current pricing is too expensive. Thanks for free $10 for trial though.
  - dmor 15y ago
    Right now the only plans I can share are those announced for expanding into Europe, but we're dedicated to bringing Twilio to developers worldwide.
pclark 15y ago
We use http://nexmo.com/ http://nexmo.com/ and have been very impressed.
- aysar 15y ago
  What differentiates them to Twilio and Tropo?
  - pclark 15y ago
    Cheaper, more reliable (we tried both the above), delivery receipts, works in almost every country. If you just want the USA, Twilio is acceptable - I think Twilio crushes it at things other than their SMS gateway though.

rachelp 15y ago

Congratulations Twilio!

kennethologist 15y ago

Twilio should take some of the money and invest it in allowing customers to send SMS internationally. There Beta has to been going on for at least 2 months?? Please Twilio. Thank you.

dmor 15y ago
Roger that!

yardie 15y ago

Is it possible to sign up for the beta for other european countries? I only see the UK listed.

dmor 15y ago
Yes, if you do not see the country you want on the site just drop us a note at help(at)twilio(dot)com and we will add you to our internal list.

axiom 15y ago

When are they going to get SMS enabled numbers in Canada? I know it's a drop in the bucket, but I will immediately switch over $10k/month in business to them as soon as they do that. The other providers are disastrously bad (yes, that includes Tropo.)

reso 15y ago
A thousand times this. One of my projects is SMS heavy, and I had to switch it to Tropo because Twilio wouldn't do Canadian numbers. The developer experience has been far inferior.
- axiom 15y ago
  The developer experience isn't even the worst of it. Try running some reliability testing. It's mind blowing how bad Tropo is and how many random hidden variables exist in their system.
  - toomuchtodo 15y ago
    Which is really sad when you consider the problem. API accepts SMS and inserts into database; workers take queue from database and action against SMS gateways (works in reverse for messages going the other way). How can this be that difficult to do?
- pmala 15y ago
  send me mail at patrick(at)twilio(dot)com happy to get you access to the ongoing canadian SMS beta
  - yogione 15y ago
    how about MMS ? ability to send images.
thedangler 15y ago
I'm with you on this one. I've been sitting on the fence for almost a year now. I mean if tropo can do it im sure they can too.

johnbender 15y ago

I was lucky enough to sit next to Evan (CTO) at a recent conference dinner and he took the time to explain some of the complex relationships they have, or are developing, with international telcos. From our conversation it seems that most of the issues in the complaints here stem from the difficulty of setting up those relationships and the cost associated with using the existing infrastructure. I'm not sure if anyone from Twilio can comment but maybe someone with some relevant experience can.

christo16 15y ago

It's a good service, but unless they bring prices way down, some big provider (Cough Amazon..) is going to come in and eat their lunch. Granted they probably wouldn't offer the level of detailed APIs that Twillio does. We started using them for SMS sending but went with Nexmo at a fraction of the cost.

toomuchtodo 15y ago
I believe their exit strategy is to be acquired by Amazon or someone of their scale. They drive their entire platform on Amazon AWS and the Rackspace cloud system, and Jeff (one of the Twilio co-founders) was previously the product manager for AWS. I went to both Twiliocon and interviewed with Twilio. They're very smart guys, but the problem is that its a race to the bottom. Their idea is innovative (webapps <-> telco integration), but anyone can do it once they learn how to handle the SMS messages between the web and the carrier gateways, as well as how to handle call flows with Asterisk or Freeswitch. Also, to me, it appears they're swimming upstream. Everyone else is moving towards unlimited voice/sms, while they're trying to stick to per minute/per sms rates (even for their VoIP offering!). Awesome idea, excellent execution, not a long term business model.
aysar 15y ago
How is Nexmo compared to Tropo?

rjj 15y ago

What are common use cases for Twilio? I've perused the site and understand the functionality but don't see where such high demand is coming from. A few people are commenting here that they use it to send SMS, which makes sense, but I'm having trouble conceptualizing large use cases besides text/call user for confirmation of some action or sending a large alert to many users. My mental summary keeps coming back to "push notifications without an app installed and to any phone". (I'm not implying that's insignificant.) Is that off base?

ryanhuff 15y ago
Its phone infrastructure in the cloud, which provides dead-simple server-side integration. They provide the telephone infrastructure, so you can focus on your application. This might include IVR style applications, SMS, voice mail, etc. If you use Rails, try out @stevegraham's twilio-rb gem.
ceejayoz 15y ago
Conference calling, notifying large numbers of people by phone quickly, menu trees, etc.
agildehaus 15y ago
It's difficult to enter the world of telecom IVR, the barrier of entry is very high, and to do anything at a large scale requires a large up-front investment. Twilio makes telecom IVR as simple as writing a web application, and they're very affordable with no up-front costs. I've written custom emergency notification systems, call-in contests, intelligent call forwarding systems (you could replicate Google Voice). Any phone app you can think of can be constructed.
- rebel19 15y ago
  Twillio is great for getting a small app out the door. But if you need to scale it and get any advanced form of call control it doesn't support it. It also is a lot more difficult to move away from it if you need to scale out and use other systems. With Tropo you can integrate it with Adhearsion and then as you need to scale move it to Rayo or Asterisk......and you also are not limited to the currently supported countries with Either offering. Tropo allows you to set up your own endpoint in a country they don't support and will integrate that in. So if you are in a South American country, or any place that Twillio doesn't support it is the only game in town.

agildehaus 15y ago

Expanding internationally is a wonderful thing, Twilio will go far if they bring their wonderful API to many countries. I just hope they take some of that investment and bring basic voice recognition to their product, and perhaps some more TTS voices (some Loquendo voices would be grand!).