Twilio, the San Francisco-based startup that powers all kinds of phone-like applications on the web and mobile, just passed 100,000 developers on its platform. That’s up from about 30,000 a year ago.
“In six months, we’ve doubled our base,” said chief executive Jeff Lawson. “It’s been really exciting for us to see what others have built.”
Bigger companies like Airbnb have used Twilio to let guests and hosts confirm bookings through text messaging, while there are others that use it to power their call centers. Twilio is marking this with a project called Milestones. The company will randomly select three Twilio developers who post a two minute video of themselves talking about how the platform helped them reach their goals. Those developers will get free travel, hotel and tickets to the company’s developer conference this year in mid-October.
So I realize it’s hard to pay attention to such-and-such-company passes arbitrary milestone when there are sometimes so many of these announcements on TechCrunch. But for Twilio, it’s a big deal since they’re a developer-centric company.
The company earns revenue when developers process phone calls or text messages or award phone numbers through their service. The standard rates are 1 cent per inbound call, 2 cents per outbound call, 1 cent per message sent or received and a $1 per new phone number. Then there’s also Twilio Client, which you can use to build Skype-like applications anywhere and that’s 1/4 cent per minute. Heavy users can negotiate better bulk rates. The more developers Twilio has actively using the platform, the more revenue the company can earn. They declined to comment on their financials for this story.
Twilio has raised nearly $34 million in venture capital including a recent December round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures. Other investors include Manu Kumar, Dave McClure, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Founders Fund and Mitch Kapor.