Twilio reportedly raises $100M funding round

The company is now said to be valued at $1 billion, making it just the latest unicorn this year

It seems like these days, with valuations running so high, it's only a matter if when, not if, we are going to get our next unicorn, also known as a startup worth at least $1 billion. There seems to be a new one of those every week!

Now it looks like we have our latest: cloud communications company Twilio has raised a $100 million Series E funding round, according to a report from Forbes on Monday. The information comes from a Delaware filing uncovered private company research firm VC Experts.

No investors in the round were named in the filing, but the round did raise the company's valuation up to $1 billion.

The San Francisco-based Twilio had previously raised over $100 million in funding, from investors that include Redpoint Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, K9 Ventures, 500 Startups, Bessemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures and SV Angel, and had previously been valued at $500 million. 

The company gives its clients the ability to integrate voice, messaging and/or VoIP capabilities into a Web or mobile app. Clients include Salesforce, Coca Cola, Box, Hulu, Uber, The Home Depot, eBay, Intuit, TaskRabbit, Sprint, Trulia, Zendesk, Sony, Shopify and AirBnb. 

In February, it announced that it has made its first ever acquisition in Authy, a company that specializes in two-factor authentication, in order to embed Authy's two-factor authentication and phone verification into its applications. In April the company introduced Twilio Video with a combination of infrastructure services as well as software development kits that allow clients to embed video into mobile apps, SaaS products, browsers and websites.

Twilio reached an annual run rate of $100 million in 2014. it is now adding $1 million in recurring revenue every week. and is also now positioning itself as a potential IPO candidate this year.

VatorNews has reached out to Twilio to confirm the new funding, and for more information on its investors and plans. We will update this story if we learn more.

As I noted earlier, this round makes Twilio just the latest company to join the not-as-exclusive-as-it-used-to-be unicorn club. In 2014 alone, 38 different companies entered the $1 billion club. That is more than the three previous years, when only 22 companies made it combined. That included Kabam, Tango, Eventbrite, and JustFab.

In the first quarter of this year alone, 16 more companies made it, including Lyft, Shazam, Nextdoor, Zomato, Docker Sprinklr and Transferwise. 

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