Plivo: The Story of an idea that scaled from GitHub to 50+ countries
The telephony business is massively complicated and with lots of gaps. Trying to be for telephony what Amazon is for the cloud, Plivo provides APIs to businesses to build their applications. Having launched the Plivo Cloud couple of months ago, it is open to all and Plivo has handled 20 + million minutes so far. After launching the cloud, Plivo started the service internationally to over 50 countries.
The Accelerators
“Both Morpheus and now YCombinator have helped us tremendously and especially at stages when we needed it the most.” informs Venky. “We hadn’t figured out anything when we were with The Morpheus and were looking for direction. We weren’t sure whether to go global or focus on a region and there were many other such issues which were put into perspective while at Morpheus,” he adds. Being a first time entrepreneur, Venky tasted the sweet fruit of success after a lot of effort. Being in the telecom industry, with a 17 year cumulative experience helped the duo a lot but it finally comes down to the idea and execution.
Still at YCombinator, the growth has been stupendous. “From 2 businesses to close to 20 now, the past few months have been great for us,” adds Venky. YCombinator has been great in terms of exposure and connections and this is almost a taken now when someone speaks of an incubator of the caliber of YC.
The Team and Vision
Having a good capital backing, Plivo will soon be expanding aggressively. Starting out as a two member team, Plivo has grown to a strength of 9, all engineers with diverse specialization fields. A rich experience in cloud is something that all the team members possess are passionate about.
An infrastructure company, the revenue starts trickling in for Plivo after a time lag mainly because the customer (SME) has to develop on the platform post which the users come in and the revenue generation starts. This development time frame for customers is around 2 months but having been in existence for quite over a year, and popularly more so for over a few months, Plivo has started making money.
“We’re taking it as it comes and don’t have a fixed vision statement but in an ideal case scenario, we’d like to see the Plivo Cloud replacing the existing infrastructure.” says Venky on a concluding note. Going strong with YCombinator, Plivo has cloud 9 waiting for it!
Website: Plivo
