communications-api
(6)
Bird
The Dutch company that rebuilt telecom's plumbing now carries a claimed 40% of the world's commercial messages - and spent two years trying to delete Twilio's margins with a 90% price cut. Bird's next bet is that the software placing those calls will be an AI agent, not a marketer.
Vonage
Vonage is a cloud communications company that lets businesses and developers add voice, video, SMS, messaging and network-based verification to their apps and customer operations. Once a pioneer of home internet phone service, it reinvented itself as a platform business built on APIs, unified communications and contact-center software, and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Ericsson operating as its Global Communications Platform.
Twilio
Twilio is a cloud communications company that gives software developers programmable APIs to add messaging, voice, email, video, and authentication to their applications. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in San Francisco, it has grown from a pay-as-you-go SMS and voice API into a broad customer-engagement platform that pairs those channels with Segment's customer data platform and a growing set of AI-driven tools. Twilio is publicly traded on the NYSE under the ticker TWLO and serves developers and enterprises across nearly every industry.
Courier
Courier is a San Francisco notification infrastructure platform that lets developers add multi-channel messaging - email, SMS, push, in-app, Slack and more - to their apps through a single API and a drag-and-drop designer. Often described as 'Stripe for notifications,' it routes messages intelligently across channels so engineering teams stop rebuilding notification systems from scratch. Founded in 2019 (YC S19), Courier raised a $35M Series B led by GV in 2022 and powers notifications for companies like New Relic, LaunchDarkly, Lattice, Vanta and Contentful.
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson is the Vice President of Revenue and Growth Marketing at Twilio, where she leads a global team driving top-of-funnel growth across demand generation, lifecycle marketing, product marketing, competitive intelligence, and the developer network. A New Zealander who built her career through government tech, analyst research at IDC, and SaaS consulting at Bluewolf before joining Twilio in 2018, she has ascended from IoT marketing director to interim CMO and now oversees the full revenue marketing engine at one of the world's leading cloud communications platforms.
Nylas
Nylas is a San Francisco-based API platform that gives developers a single, secure way to plug email, calendar, and contacts into their apps - replacing months of provider-by-provider integration work with a few lines of code.