Plivo (YC S12) raises 1.75 million from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, others | Hacker News Reader

Plivo (YC S12) raises 1.75 million from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, others

marketwire.com

53 pointssunsu38 comments

We built a click 2 call app for a client using Twilio and now realized that they needed to have Caller ID to be passed to the call center.

This morning, we were looking into Tropo. Glad to see Plivo also supports setting arbitrary caller ID.

Take a shot at the service. Would love your feedback.

Email Twilio support, they can help you with that (I used to work there)

Hi Chintan - Let me know if you need any help. I'd be happy to discuss Tropo's capabilities.

Thanks,

Frank Geck Director of Tropo Sales fgeck@voxeolabs.com

Awesome! I really enjoyed working with Plivo, in comparison to Twilio, Nexmo. They even had (306) phone numbers. I made a Hubchilla like clone with them (https://github.com/Jonovono/URconnecting)

edit: Oops, had the repo set to private :p

What is the main difference from Twilio? In my perception both services are fairly similar, with Twilio having the first-mover benefits.

The features in our platform. Our customers who come from other platforms tell us that it is about the depth of features and the simplicity of our APIs.

We allow you to bring your own carrier services. This is huge for enterprises and service providers.

Our ability to register SIP devices - actually connect your IP phone or soft client

Our support team continues to get rave reviews from our customers…

Can you say something about your availability numbers? Twillio is sometimes unavailable, something we notice when running a high availability service that uses them.

We are very serious about our availability numbers. Quite a few large Enterprise customers who use us, completely depend on us for their telephony infrastructure.

Feel free to email us at hello@plivo.com and we can help you with more specific details.

Congrats! Plivo's one of the most impressive startups out of this last batch.

Twilio's in trouble :)

Plivo has useful features that Twilio doesn't have, e.g. Playing in call notifications, bidirectional SIP and IIRC early media. I think Plivo basically copying Twilio's API schema was a mistake as IMO it's not perfect itself. Twilio most certainly should not be resting on its laurels.

One thing I'm happy to see Plivo stop doing is arguably trolling Twilio at every turn. All that did was to indirectly make the conversation about Twilio, instead of Plivo. It's a mistake Twilio has never made, and IMO one of the reasons behind their success.

We also have come up with a new home page redesign.

Congratulations. Definitely my first choice for building telephony.

Glad you think so. Watch out for more awesome stuff coming really soon.

Congrats guys! Seems like a cool platform.

Question: I noticed the press release on MarketWire is nicely packed with keyword-rich links (clever SEO work!). Does this get distribution on sites beyond MarketWire, and if so, do the links remain? Just curious how effective this sort of strategy is for link-building :)

If it's getting scraped heavily and published elsewhere, Google will most likely not pass PageRank for any links other than the original once it's recognized as duplicate content on multiple pages.

In fact, in the MarketWire article, having a bunch of keyword-rich text all pointing at the same page will likely have little SEO value, as diminishing returns hits really quickly in a case like this.

Whats interesting about this is that SV Angel invested. Ron Conway has a very close relationship with Twilio and The TwilioFund is "powered by 500Startups and SVAngel".

I wonder if they invested beyond the Start Fund

Just to clarify, None of the investors mentioned here are including the start fund!

Cool thanks

Hope that helps :)

Yes, we invested beyond Start Fund. We often invest in "competitive" companies either in present or future. By that, I mean that we invest in companies that are competitive now or unrelated companies that for one reason or another, become competitive. In fact, it's more common for us to see companies that are competitive now diverge just in enough so the end products are not competitive.

We invest in founders, trends and spaces. We have a conflict policy that's based on what Ron has implemented over his 20 year career. I talked about our policy on Quora here: http://b.qr.ae/u8dZQ9.

Here, we are big fans of this trend - new voice services being created and disrupted by software. Thus if we like founders working on this problem, we will be positively inclined. We are huge fans of Jeff at Twilio. We are also big fans of Venky and his team.

Is the plan to still support an Open Source version of the cloud hosted app, so if you wanted to run your own you could? Do you also sell support/commercial licenses?

Congrats Venky. Awesome progress since demo day!

Thanks

Can't wait to play around with the api. Definitely the best pricing I've seen.

Have been using plivo for the past month. Awesome customer support by Keshav and the rest of the team. Congrats on the seed round :)

Thanks bluekite! We always strive to serve our customer the best.

Congrats to Be and Team. This is a hard world to work in and I wish Plivo much success :).

See you at ClueCon!

Congrats Venky!

Thanks :)

Congrats!

Are you guys using Django? I met some of your team at the Pycon India.

Yes we do. It was good meeting you at Pycon.

Congratulations Venky & team.

Congratulations Venky

Well done!

Thanks :)

thanks !

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