Twilio Closes Funding Round, Lands Major Customers For Its Telephony API
Twilio, the powerful API for phone services that allows developers to quickly integrate telephony functionality into their apps, has closed its first institutional investment round, which was led by Founders Fund and Mitchell Kapor. The company plans to use the new funding to increase its efforts in sales and marketing, and to enhance the infrastructure of the service (likely to cope with increasing demand). The amount of the round was not disclosed.
In conjunction with the funding announcement, Twilio has also announced some of its early customers, including Cheetos, Earth911, and Tumblr, which used the service to launch its Call-to-audio feature last month. Sony Music has also been using Twilio to promote some of its album releases; musicians have been recording phone messages, which can then be sent to fans of the band (you can hear a sample recording below).
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I integrated Twilio into the early stage startup HintCafe and am writing to share my expience.
At HintCafe, we built some interesting features like leaving a voice message for a user and calling another user without knowing their number. See http://hintcafe.com/faq or my example profile at http://hintcafe.com/user/vivek
We built the following on HintCafe using Twilio
a) Phone validation - users can add their phone number to the account. The phone number is validated using something similar to Twilio add-a-caller-id process. User is given a 4 digit validation code on hintcafe.com and user enters that code when hintcafe.com makes an outgoing call to the phone using Twilio make call api. The validation code is captured using Gather.
b) Leave a voice message - The user calls hintcafe.com and then user is asked to record the message for the chosen user. This is done using Record verb. The message receiver is sent a flash player linked to mp3 of their recording on hintcafe.com inbox. The recording mp3 is fetched using recordingurl provided by Twilio.
c) Call Forward - Users of hintcafe.com can talk to each other without sharing their phone number. The caller calls Hintcafe.com incoming number hosted on Twilio. HintCafe uses a dial to call the other user using callerID of HintCafe to make the dial. This way, both users can talk to each other without sharing their phone numbers.
My last week developing the solution with Twilio has been a very positive experience. The Twilio team on help@twilio.com and here on forums is very prompt and concise in reply. The overall product is well designed with the REST APIs and is simple to user. And ofcourse, the pricing model is just fantastic which makes it capable for early stage startups like mine to build interesting features without considerable upfront cost.