[June 17, 2013] Twilio Secures $70 Million in Funding Tweet Jun 17, 2013 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- Twilio, a cloud communications company, announced the completion of a $70 million Series D round of funding. According to a release, new investors include Redpoint Ventures, who led the round with existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. These firms join other existing investors in supporting Twilio's mission to change the way businesses communicate. In addition, Twilio welcomed Scott Raney, a partner with Redpoint, to the company's board of directors. "It's an exciting time to be at Twilio," said Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio. "For each of the past three years, Twilio experienced more than 100 percent revenue growth as we helped developers and corporations realize they can tap the power of the cloud for voice and messaging services. This represents a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity, and we're just beginning to see what's made possible by the developers building solutions on top of our platform. " Twilio said it was recently named as one of CNBC's 50 Disruptors, companies that are changing the economy and overall business landscape. Companies on this list are organizations that have entered traditional sectors and turned them upside down creating ripple effects throughout their economic ecosystems. Also on the list were Twilio customers Airbnb, Box, Shopify, and Uber among others. Those companies are all using Twilio's communications API platform to transform the hospitality, data storage, retail, transportation and other industries. As part of this announcement, Scott Raney joins Twilio's board of directors. Raney is a partner with Redpoint Ventures, focusing on cloud computing, enterprise infrastructure and mobile. Raney also serves on the board of directors or has been involved with many of Redpoint's cloud computing investments. The firm's growing list of investments includes a number of cloud computing companies such as Cloud.com, Expensify, Heroku, Stripe, Zendesk, Zuora and Infer. "Twilio has built an exceptional business around the vision of changing communications forever," said Scott Raney, partner at Redpoint Ventures. "The team Jeff has assembled is executing on that vision and capturing the attention of developers and companies in a range of markets. We're thrilled to now be part of that team and help Twilio accelerate new product development and further strengthen its marketing and sales efforts around the world." DFJ joins Twilio's Series D financing, contributing expertise to the company given its portfolio of enterprise cloud computing companies including Box, SugarCRM, InsightSquared, RichRelevance, PubMatic, ShareThis and Yodle. Twilio said it virtualizes traditional on-premises telecommunications infrastructure allowing developers to move voice and messaging applications to the cloud. In much the same way that corporations have migrated CRM, ERP, compute-processing power and storage to the cloud, Twilio enables the same for communications. Twilio's combination of communications API platform and business model allows companies to eliminate massive upfront investments in hardware with pay-as-you-go pricing, allows developers to build exactly the solutions they want with standard web programing languages, and scales to meet any volume requirement thanks to the on-demand power of the cloud. In the past year, Twilio said, it expanded its presence globally and is now available in more than 40 countries. The company introduced a range of new capabilities and products including new Android and iOS development kits for the company's Twilio Client product, WebRTC integration for improved voice calling from within web browsers, from Twilio that enables enterprises to more easily integrate existing on-premises solutions with Twilio's cloud-based platform, multi-user account management, and much more. In addition, the company inked partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Japanese service provider KDDI Web Communications and others. Twilio is reinventing traditional telecom by moving telephony from the hardware closet to the cloud. Twilio provides a cloud infrastructure that any web developer can leverage to orchestrate phone calls, text messages and VoIP communications in existing web and mobile applications. More information: www.twilio.com ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]