Twilio, the company whose APIs help developers easily add SMS, voice, and VoIP functionality to their applications, has closed a Series D round of $70M dollars.
The round was led by Redpoint Ventures and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, and backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. As part of the deal, Redpoint’s Scott Raney will be joining the company’s board of directors.
Still not quite sure what Twilio does? Let’s say you’re building a service that sends its users a daily text with facts about cats. Between dealing with carriers and SMS gateways, sending texts programatically is… actually pretty challenging. Twilio turns it into a single line of code, in exchange for about 1¢ per text sent or received. For most things a developer could want to do over a phone line — be it SMS, voice calling, or VoIP — Twilio can handle the vast majority of the grunt work with just a few simple API calls.
Think this news sounds familiar? We actually broke the news that Twilio was in talks to raise a big Series D almost a month ago. I’d reported then that the company was aiming to raise $50M, which Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson confirmed to me yesterday was in fact their original goal. “We thought we’d raise somewhere between $35M and $50M,” he said, “but in the end, interest proved to be a bit higher than we expected.”
Prior to this round, Twilio had raised $33.5M dollars, making this round alone over twice the size of everything the company had raised before. Twilio is currently made up of just over 160 employees, with the company having just moved into a bigger office — an old paper/textile factory they retrofitted when they couldn’t find a big enough space in the city — last month.
So what’s next? In my previous post on this round, I bet that Twilio was heading towards an IPO. While he wouldn’t positively confirm it, Lawson did say that the company “doesn’t expect to need to raise another round”, and that an IPO would be “the next logical step”.