2014 was a great year for Plivo. We hit profitability in early May and our growth since then has been remarkable. Our voice traffic grew 100%, and our SMS traffic grew a staggering 500%. Our number of paid customers grew 200%, which led to an impressive 250% increase in annual revenues compared to 2013.
In addition to our growth, we also proudly delivered more benefits to our customers, including the launch of international SMS, the launch of SMS short codes in the US, private beta for two-way SMS numbers in 23 countries, and queuing for SMS and voice calls. We also made incoming SMS free in all of our countries and lowered prices for international voice.
Of course, last year wasn’t without its bumps. In March, we experienced a DDoS attack that led to a few hours of downtime. Since then, we’ve invested heavily in security and monitoring. Our growth also meant that our phone number inventory was depleting faster than expected. In October, we improved our inventory automation system and increased our phone number inventory by 400% by the end of 2014. Despite these growing pains, our customers’ businesses have continued to flourish on our infrastructure, and we cannot thank you enough for your trust and support.
We’ve also been keeping busy in the back end to deliver the most reliable global communications backbone in the industry. We can proudly say that we work with Tier 1 carriers in more than 100 countries to give us direct connections to 1,600+ networks around the world. This means that our connections are free from low-cost routing, routing dilution, and blending, so our customers get low latency, improved connectivity, high SMS delivery rates, and clear voice calls.
We’re so serious about delivering great quality of service that we recently built a dedicated team to manage carriers end to end. They continually negotiate for better prices and connections on your behalf with local carriers around the world. They also manage and ensure availability of a large, diverse inventory of mobile, fixed, and toll-free phone numbers in 55 countries and 8,000+ area codes. Our carrier team also specializes in regulatory compliance, helping you adhere to local regulatory and legal requirements in all countries.
Our mission has always been to simplify global telecom and enable access to quality cloud communications at a low cost. We will continue to make our customers our utmost priority, because we couldn’t have done all of this without your support.
Sincerely,
Venky, Co-founder
