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Is Twilio profitable?

• josh2600 13y ago
  They're not public so it's hard to say, but I would hazard a guess that Twilio has not turned a profit yet
• hendzen 13y ago
  Probably not. There's a lot of competition (Plivo, Tropo, etc) in this space now, so they have to keep their rates low.
  • neya 13y ago
    Can you please give me a brief reason as to why not? I have no clue as to what might be expensive for them and so forth. I know what they do and how their service works, though. As a developer, I mean.
    • hendzen 13y ago
      This is complete speculation by me, so take this with a grain of salt. Their product has essentially been commoditized - there are so many companies offering telephony APIs that they probably cannot charge prices that are high enough to offset the costs of paying ~100 developer salaries. Companies with similar products: - Tropo - TelAPI - CallFire - SendFlow - Holio - Many more (see: http://www.quora.com/Who-are-Twilios-competitors http://www.quora.com/Who-are-Twilios-competitors) If you look at the pricing of all these offerings, you will immediately notice that they all are pretty much the same. What this tells me is that there is enough competition in this space that the margins are likely very low. Edit: fixed a typo (CalFire -> CallFire)
      • orangethirty 13y ago
        That's a good point. They seem to be making the same thing. Didn't really see much difference in the offerings. Though Twilio seems to have a better brand. How much have they raised over time?
        • josh2600 13y ago
          33.5M so far. Twilio has the best documentation of any Communications API vendor, but their issue when working with large operators is their inability to work inside the corporate firewall. They're on AWS with a lot of servers and it is not a part of their strategy to build a new infrastructure inside of someone else's firewall. Voxeo does build inside the firewall, but they're a lot harder to understand. There's a lot of confusion about who does what in our industry, even Twilio is what I'd describe as an access-innovator. In Telecom the change that's happening right now is the exposure of underlying communications services. Companies like Twilio are taking services like calls, SMS and Video connections and creating APIs to consume these services. Right now, there's no easy way to do these things programmatically. Companies like 2600hz, where I work, take a different approach where we're actually working on the underlying infrastructure (not so much on the API). In this respect a company like Voxeo is much more competitive to Twilio. Callfire is a call-application service and not really competitive to a Twilio or a Plivo. So yeah, lots of stuff going on, very complicated. Most folks are working on the access layers or applications and not the underlying infrastructure.
          • orangethirty 13y ago
            85.5 million in funding if this round is to be closed. Chump change to what they are working on cracking open. Like you said, the work they are doing is more on the industry than anything else. Who knows where they might pivot to once telecoms open up a bit more.
            • josh2600 13y ago
              Interesting point: what is Twilio's addressable market in your opinion?
              • orangethirty 13y ago
                I don't know the market that well, aside from doing some analysis on some of the telco securities (for my own use). Though they seem to be building themselves to be a next-gen telco.