Twilio is the latest tech startup to join the ranks of private companies worth at least $1 billion after quietly raising a $100 million round of funding, Forbes has learned.
The cloud communications company authorized the Series E round of funding in April, its first fundraise in nearly two years, according to a Delaware filing uncovered Monday by VC Experts, a private company research firm.
The documents filed on April 24 authorize 8,841,730 new shares at an issue price of $11.31 per share. At that new price, Twilio's 100 million total shares outstanding would give the company a post-money valuation of $1.1 billion. A source with knowledge of the funding confirmed the raise put Twilio's valuation past the billion-dollar valuation mark.
It is unknown what new investors, if any, have led the investment, and if the round has fully closed. Twilio declined to comment through a spokesperson Monday night.
The round about doubles Twilio's valuation, as well as the total funding the company has raised since launching in 2008. A range of investors had put $103.7 million into the company before the new raise, including Series D lead Redpoint Ventures, Series C co-leads Bessemer Venture Partners (which led its Series B) and Union Square Ventures (which led the Series A). The company had formerly been worth about $500 million.
San Francisco-based Twilio provides cloud communication infrastructure to businesses so they can interact quickly and safely with their own customers. That includes Uber, which has used Twilio since at least 2013 to handle status changes and notifications regarding customers' rides. Enterprise collaboration company
The eight-year-old company has been tied to rumors of IPO since it last raised money in June of 2013. At the time, CEO Jeff Lawson had told TechCrunch the company didn't need to raise more and that going public would be a logical next step. But that was before a shift in tech company fundraising made it more attractive for late-stage companies to remain private longer, finding comparable cash to what they could attain on on the public markets from additional investors without the added scrutiny of becoming public. In February, Series D investor Scott Raney told the Wall Street Journal that Twilio was in "no rush to go public."
In the same article, Twilio announced it had crossed a revenue run rate of $100 million in 2014 and was adding $1 million in recurring revenue every week. Since then, the company launched video capability and acquired a two-factor authentication startup, Authy. More than 500,000 developers work with Twilio's APIs.
