With the recent hard times, both Facebook and Twitter shareholders have faced, it might be an odd time to discuss another technology company, Twilio (Nasdaq: TWLO).

I’ll be honest, up until a few days ago, I was unaware of who Twilio was. It was only after digging in to learn more about the company did I realize I use their services in many of the apps on my phone. And many other people do as well.

So when the stock price jumped the other day, I thought it was a good time to go into detail about this stock and help keep investors thoughts of making money in line.

In this post, I’ll walk you through who Twilio is, what they do, and if now is a smart time to buy the stock or not.

Who Is Twilio?

Twilio is a cloud communications platform that helps businesses add solutions to their web and mobile applications. I know that sounds like a mouthful, so here is an example of what Twilio does.

Think of a time when you are on a website and it asks if you want to receive text messages. You type in a series of numbers to a send to number and suddenly you begin to receive text messages back. You interact with these texts by simply replying yes, no, stop, etc.

The company behind this service is most likely Twilio. They offer many services, including:

  • Voice and video: make and receive calls from within an app
  • Messaging: send and receive global SMS and MMS messages within an app
  • Authentication: allow for two-factor authentication from within apps and online
  • By using Twilio APIs, businesses can easily integrate these features into their product offerings. Before Twilio, it was cumbersome to use any of these, let alone all of them.

    Twilio By The Numbers

    Twilio stock went public in 2016 and being a shareholder since then has been a nauseating ride. The stock debuted at $15 a share, quickly spiked to $70 a share, then fell back to $24 a share. Remember, this is over a two year period.

    Now the stock is hot again as the company has been blowing out earnings. In fact, in their latest earnings release, revenue growth was up 54% and has been climbing by at least 40%.