Twilio expands into Europe

First move out of US for firm that puts voice and text services into apps and the cloud.

The company has opened a UK office and also launched in beta in Poland, France, Portugal, Austria and Denmark, with an additional 11 countries (Italy, Romania, Greece, Belgium, Czech Republic, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Finland) launching by the end of the year.

Twilio’s service is used to build web and mobile apps that can make and receive telephone calls. This makes it cheaper to run call centres and send marketing messages by SMS.

But it also lets developers create apps and services that incorporate voice and text. One example is fakegirlfriend.co, which invites users to text in and then receive automated responses from a pretend partner.

Jeff Lawson, Twilio CEO, said: “Through our powerful APIs we enable developers to build fantastic, innovative products. We estimate there are more than 10 million software developers worldwide, and we look forward to serving a greater number of them than ever before from our European headquarters in London. ”

The firm has already announced its first major European customer. Denmark's Zendesk will launch Zendesk Voice in the UK. It's a cloud-based call centre  that lets users set up call centres at a fraction of the cost of traditional set-ups.