Plivo

History

Plivo was founded in 2011 by Venky Balasubramanian and Michael Ricordeau, which originally started as an open source telephony project. Venky and Mike met on Github while they were both looking for a communications platform to add Voice and SMS functions to their own applications. On May 26, 2011 and after a few months of working remotely, Plivo Open Source was released as a framework for developers to prototype voice calling web and mobile applications. Plivo Open Source Framework is licensed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License Version 1.1.

Mike and Venky met in person for the first time at ClueCon 2011 to present Plivo Open Source to the developer community, an annual conference for webRTC and telephony developers hosted by FreeSWITCH. The open source project was so well received that Mike and Venky were approached by businesses that wanted to pay for a hosted version of Plivo Open Source. Soon after, Mike and Venky founded Plivo Inc, a cloud communications platform that removed all the complexities of telephony and democratize access to voice and SMS for businesses of all sizes.

Upon being reject from Y Combinator the first time, Mike and Venky went fast to work proving that Plivo could fill a large gap in the current telephony space. At this time, Plivo was accepted to be part of Morpheus Batch 6, an incubator and angel investor that helped push the company in the right direction. After getting a handful of initial customers, they applied to Y Combinator again and were accepted in the summer 2012 batch. After launching their scalable voice and SMS API on demo day, Plivo received $1.75M in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, and SV Angel. At the time, Venky dubbed Plivo as the AWS of Telephony that "provides a reliable, scaleable platform where companies can host their web servers".

Since Plivo's round of seed funding, it has not raised any additional funds. Instead, Plivo became profitable in 2014.

As of January 2017, Plivo has 100 team members across 2 offices: one in San Francisco, United States and another in Bangalore, India. In 2016, Plivo delivered over 2 billion voice minutes and SMS customers combined.

Technology

The Plivo Open Source Framework is built with open source software including FreeSWITCH, Python, gevent, and Flask. It enables developers to use any cloud hosting solution or telecom provider including their own hardware servers. Plivo also supports any communications media that FreeSWITCH supports including calls over PSTN, SIP, H323, Skype, or FreeTDM and media codecs including G.722, SILK, CELT, or G.729.

Plivo's hosted platform (also called Plivo cloud) is also built using the FreeSWITCH framework, a newer, open source alternative to Asterisk. Plivo was the first widely available API for the FreeSWITCH platform. Plivo's cloud technology can be divided into two major layers: carrier networks and API framework. Plivo connects directly to carrier networks to make and receive voice calls and text messages. These carriers are connected through Plivo's network of PoPs (points of presence) world wide to enable global coverage. Plivo's functionality lies in the software framework, which is exposed to developers through an API platform. Developers can take these APIs and XMLs as building blocks to form their own communications applications.

Plivo provides an Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to make and receive calls and SMS. These APIs are used in conjunction with XML responses to control the flow of a call or a message. Developers can create Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) endpoints to perform the telephony operations and the APIs are platform independent and can be used in any programming environment including PHP, Ruby, Python, .NET, Java, Node.js, and Go.

Plivo's HTTP REST APIs also support WebRTC, SIP trunking and SMPP connectivity.