In 2010, Venky Balasubramanian and Michael Ricordeau noticed that they were having trouble integrating telephony applications into their Web applications. The two met by happenstance in 2010 and realized that developing telephony applications was taking too long.

With that realization, Plivo was born.

The two developed Plivo as an open source project, and according to company sources, the first few customers that used the solution had migrated from an existing service. When the company founders saw the potential, they jumped into business full time, showing a profit after two months and steady growth since.

According Venky Balasubramanian, Plivo focuses primarily on telephony infrastructure. “We abstract the complex telecom infrastructure into simple pay as you go APIs,” he said. “However, we don’t lock you into our own carrier contracts. Enterprises or large businesses are free to bring their existing carriers on our platform. Just as Amazon Cloud does for Web hosting, we do for telephony and work on open standards of Telephony like SIP/Jingle.”

One independent developer, Clint Berry, posted about reasons why he thinks that Plivo Cloud is better than Twilio (News - Alert). He pointed out that Plivo Cloud allows developers to connect SIP-based phones dreictly to the cloud, allowing you to use Plivo as your phone system, eliminating additional VoIP costs and making deployment s easy as buying a SIP phone and connecting to your Plivo account.

Unlike Twilio, Plivo does not lock you into a particular carrier. It will tie your carrier into its FreeSWITCH system, providing an unprecedented level of freedom. Finally, Plivo allows you to host your own cloud.

This is a key part of the Plivo strategy and it allows for crucial redundancy that other such companies do not provide. 

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