Twilio
More info
- Creator
- Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, John Wolthuis
- Released
- 2008
- Type
- Communications API (CPaaS)
The company that wrapped the phone network in a REST API, turning a text message into an HTTP request.
Before Twilio, automated calls or SMS meant carrier contracts, telephony hardware and a lot of patience. In 2008 Jeff Lawson and two co-founders in San Francisco reduced it to a few lines of code. Incoming calls and messages arrive as webhooks on your own server, and outgoing ones are a single API call. The category was later named CPaaS, Communications Platform as a Service.
Login codes, "your driver has arrived" texts and delivery notifications often went through Twilio. It bought Authy (2015), the email service SendGrid (2019) and the customer-data platform Segment (2020). In 2022 attackers tricked its employees into handing over credentials by SMS phishing, an irony the industry did not miss.