Pandemic Darling Twilio Has Many More Automated Text Messages for You

One of the stranger consequences of the pandemic has been the emergence of a class of arcane tech companies facilitating some small part of the stay-at-home experience and that are now suddenly, improbably hot: Shopify (for online stores not named Amazon, market cap: $161 billion, as of late February), Atlassian (for virtual workplace collaboration, $60 billion), and Snowflake (for cloud-based databases, $76 billion). But none of those have seen their stock prices rise as quickly as Twilio, which is worth $63 billion, up from just $10 billion on March 16.

The technical services provided by Twilio Inc., like those offered by its peers, are difficult to explain to civilians. The company offers an “application programming interface”—cloud-based software, basically—that companies use to make calls or send automated text messages to their customers. The security alerts asking you to verify your account on the digital payments service Stripe come from Twilio, as do those from DoorDash informing you that your dinner is on its way. Each time a message is sent or received, Twilio charges three-quarters of a penny. The company also offers software that helps businesses manage email marketing campaigns and operate call centers, using the same pay-per-use model.