Twilio Inc.

Is Twilio publicly traded?
Yes. Twilio has traded on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker TWLO since its June 2016 IPO. Its shares are included in major mid-cap technology indices.

Who owns Twilio?
Public shareholders, primarily institutional investors such as Vanguard and BlackRock. No single shareholder or founder holds control, and the company moved to single-class voting after its early dual-class structure sunset.

Who is the CEO of Twilio?
Khozema Shipchandler has been CEO since January 2024. He previously served as Twilio's CFO and COO and spent most of his earlier career at GE. Founder Jeff Lawson led the company for its first 15 years.

What does Twilio do?
Twilio provides APIs that let applications send messages, make calls, verify users, deliver email, and manage customer data. Products include the core communications APIs, SendGrid for email, Segment for customer data, and Flex for contact centers.

Is Twilio profitable?
Yes. Twilio reported GAAP operating income of $158 million for fiscal 2025, its first year of meaningful operating profitability, along with more than $920 million in free cash flow and $924 million in non-GAAP operating income.

How many customers does Twilio have?
Twilio reported more than 349,000 active customer accounts as of fiscal 2025, ranging from startups embedding verification texts to enterprises running global customer engagement programs.

What happened to Twilio's founder?
Jeff Lawson stepped down as CEO in January 2024 after 15 years, following activist investor pressure for restructuring. He remains a significant shareholder but holds no executive role.

Twilio started in 2008 when Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis set out to make communications programmable. Lawson, who had served as Amazon Web Services' first product manager, saw that cloud computing had made infrastructure rentable but telephony still required carrier contracts and hardware. Twilio's founding product was a voice API that let any application place and receive calls through a web request.

The company launched publicly at a 2008 developer event where Lawson famously built a call-tracking app live on stage. SMS support followed, and the app economy provided the market: verification texts, order notifications, and ride-hailing calls ran on Twilio for a generation of startups. Uber's masked rider-driver calling became the canonical case study.

Funding rounds from Bessemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, and others fueled growth, and the June 2016 NYSE IPO at $15 per share made Twilio one of the first developer-infrastructure companies to prove public-market appetite for API businesses. The stock multiplied through 2020 as digital engagement spending exploded.

Acquisition strategy expanded the surface. The 2016 additions of the Authy two-factor authentication service and the Beepsend messaging unit were followed by the two transformational deals: SendGrid for about $2 billion in stock in early 2019 and Segment for about $3.2 billion in late 2020. The Segment purchase signaled ambition beyond plumbing into customer data and marketing software.

Reality arrived in 2022 and 2023. Growth decelerated, losses persisted, and the stock fell more than 80 percent from its peak. Activist investors including Legion Partners and Starboard Value took positions and pressed for restructuring. The company cut roughly a quarter of its workforce across two rounds, consolidated business units, and in January 2024 Lawson stepped down. CFO and COO Khozema Shipchandler took over as CEO.

The Shipchandler era has been a profitability story. Restructuring, asset sales including the ValueFirst messaging unit, and disciplined spending produced the first sustained GAAP operating profits in company history. Fiscal 2025 closed at $5.07 billion of revenue with 13 percent organic growth, $924 million of non-GAAP operating income, and a growing voice AI product line built around ConversationRelay and Conversation Intelligence.

Twilio has appeared on the Forbes Cloud 100 list of top private cloud companies before its IPO and has been named to Fast Company's most innovative companies lists. Its API documentation and developer relations program are routinely cited as industry benchmarks, and Signal, its annual customer conference, remains one of the larger developer-focused enterprise events.

The August 2022 phishing breach was Twilio's most significant security incident. Attackers obtained employee credentials through SMS phishing and accessed data belonging to a limited set of customer accounts, with downstream exposure for users of services, including Signal, that relied on Twilio verification. The incident prompted mandatory internal hardening and industry discussion of phishing-resistant authentication.

The 2023-2024 activist campaign was a governance rather than a legal controversy. Legion Partners and Starboard Value pressed for cost discipline and strategic review, ultimately contributing to the leadership transition and the sale or shutdown of non-core units. Coverage framed it as a referendum on the company's growth-at-all-costs era.

Operationally, Twilio navigates telecom regulation continuously: A2P 10DLC registration rules for US business messaging, robocall mitigation duties, and carrier enforcement actions that affect deliverability. These are compliance realities of the CPaaS business rather than company-specific scandals.