Twilio Fund Winners from Twilio Conference 2011

Twilio Fund Winners from Twilio Conference 2011

The Twilio Fund is a micro-fund that was started by 500 Startups and SV Angel in September of 2010 to invest one quarter of a million dollars of seed capital into Twilio-
powered startups.  Since the launch of Twilio Fund, ten companies received funding including FastCall411, KnockKnock, Magnolia Prime, Order Mapper, Proven, Qwipd, Textaurant, Voicendo, and Volta.

At the first annual Twilio Conference this year,  nine companies competed on stage in front of 600 people for a chance to win one of two final investments from the first Twilio Fund.  Dave McClure, Founding Partner of 500 Startups, recognizes Twilio’s mission to empower people to do heroic things with communications, “TwilioCon is the perfectplace to showcase Twilio-powered startups, who are building a new class of next generation communications applications for business.  With Twilio Fund, 500 Startups is getting in early on companies built on the most compelling developer platform since Facebook.”  Twilio Fund announced a $50,000 investment in cloud phone support software company Talkdesk and a $10,000 investment in mobile engagement platform Mobonics.  Brett Kopf of Remind 101 won an Apple iPhone 4s for the People’s Choice award.  Check out the video below of Twilio Fund pitches from Remind 101, TeenDriver, CallMeMeeting, BlueFusion, TalkDesk, Mobonics, FastCall411, Proven, and Volta.

Twilio Conference 2011: TwilioFund Winners from Twilio on Youtube.

TalkDesk enables companies to build cloud-based call centers for providing customer support integrated with existing support and CRM systems like Zendesk and Highrise.  “Presenting our company to investors on stage at the Twilio Conference was an incredible experience,” said Tiago Paiva, CEO of Talkdesk. “This investment from the Twilio Fund will make it possible for us to grow our company and launch our  product into beta.”

Mobonics powers customer feedback surveys and rewards via mobile phones, allowing you to engage your customers at the best possible moments. “We are excited about being picked at TwilioCon to be funded as a Twilio Fund company, and to gain access to the mentors and eco-system of 500 Startups.  We’ll be using this funding to both enhance our offering, and to step up our customer acquisition” said Scott C. Lemon, Founder and CTO of Monbonics.com.  “We have worked with voice and text messaging for years now, but Twilio’s platform has revolutionized our ability to rapidly create new voice and text capabilities that support our business model.”

In addition to the final investments, Dave McClure and Ron Conway also announced that a second $250,000 seed fund, Twilio Fund CONNECT.  Twilio Fund Connect empowers entrepreneurs to bridge the gap between your customers and the Twilio communications platform.  Twilio Connect provides an easy onramp for developers to integrate telecommunications into successful applications while removing the burden of usages based billing.  Submissions are open from now until December 31st, 2011.