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Twilio was founded in 2008 by Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis and was originally based in both Seattle, Washington, and San Francisco, California.Twilio's first major press coverage, in November 2008, was the result of an application built by Jeff Lawson to rickroll people, which investor Dave McClure used on TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington as a prank. A few days later, on November 20, 2008, the company launched Twilio Voice, an API to make and receive phone calls completely hosted in the cloud. Twilio's text messaging API was released in February 2010, and SMS shortcodes were released in public beta in July 2011.Twilio raised approximately $103 million in venture capital growth funding. Twilio received its first round of seed funding in March 2009 for an undisclosed amount from Mitch Kapor, The Founders Fund, Dave McClure, David G. Cohen, Chris Sacca, Manu Kumar, from K9 Ventures and Jeff Fluhr. Twilio's first A round of funding was led by Union Square Ventures for $3.7 million and its second B round of funding, for $12 million, was led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Twilio received $17 million in a Series C round in December 2011 from Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures. In July 2013 Twilio received another $70 million from Redpoint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Bessemer Venture Partners. In July 2015, Twilio raised a $130 million Series E from Fidelity, T Rowe Price, Altimeter Capital Management, and Arrowpoint Partners, in addition to Amazon and Salesforce.Twilio filed for IPO and started trading on June 23, 2016 with a 92% increase on the first day.In March 2020, Twilio announced the appointment of Steve Pugh as Chief Security Officer and Glenn Weinstein as Chief Customer Officer.On August 4, 2022, an unknown attacker gained access to Twilio's internal network through an SMS phishing campaign targeting Twilio's employees. Twilio confirmed the breach three days later, clarifying that it affected only "a limited number" of customer accounts. On August 15, Signal announced that it had been affected by the breach, indicating that the 125 customers affected included at least some enterprise accounts. In September 2022, Twilio laid off 11% of its workforce to become profitable. In the company announcement, CEO Jeff Lawson claimed decisions of which employees to lay off were made through an "anti-racist/anti-oppression lens."
