Cloud communications company Twilio has expanded into Australia, opening a local office and appointing former Oracle and Symantec sales executive Richard Watson as regional country director to drive growth.
Founded in 2008 by Jeff Lawson, Twilio is a cloud communications provider giving developers API tools to integrate voice, video, and text communication into their products. Essentially, if you have received a call from your Uber driver or a text from your Airtasker, it has been powered by Twilio.
The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2016 following a US$150 million initial public offering (IPO).
The move into Australia will see the company open its 11th office outside the United States, with local branches in Sydney and later Melbourne to house sales, customer success, service, and support staff.
George Hu, chief operating officer at Twilio, said the move builds on the company’s existing customer and developer momentum in Australia and lays the foundation for “building a significant long-term business in Australia and across the APAC region”.
“Richard will lead a broad effort to grow our Australia team, drive momentum, and build customer relationships. We believe we’re only at the beginning of this incredible journey and we can’t wait to see how our customers use Twilio to engage their consumers in a whole new way,” Hu said.
Watson added that the company has a “fantastic amount of organic traction” locally, with over 100 companies, including the likes of Atlassian, Dominos, and the aforementioned Airtasker, using Twilio.
“This is a testament to the quality of Twilio’s product offering and also to the maturity of the Australian market. There is a strong culture of innovation here and IT leaders in Aussie enterprises recognise the opportunities that new technologies can offer their business,” he said.
“Engagement between businesses and their customers continues to be a pain point and I believe Twilio will go a long way to help solve this problem, and help Aussie businesses to deliver extraordinary customer experiences at scale, and grow dramatically in the process.”
The move down under follows Twilio’s launch last month of Flex, a programmable contact center platform. Where Twilio previously provided APIs for its customers’ own developers to integrate Twilio’s tools into their own technology, Flex is an out-of-the-box solution bringing together its full suite of tools for clients to easily put to use and customise as they see fit.
Image: Richard Watson.
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