Winners Announced for Twilio Startup Awards 2021

Winners Announced for Twilio Startup Awards 2021

The Twilio Startups team wanted to celebrate all of the innovative ways that startups are using our APIs to build the future of communications. These early-stage startups all exemplify how founders can use Twilio's APIs for channels like SMS, Voice, Email, and more to build next-level communications experiences to engage customers around the world.

We are super excited to announce the winners our very first Twilio Startups Awards event. Here's the finalists, runners-up and inaugural winner. All finalists received substantial Twilio credits, but the real prize was presenting to Silicon Valley's most prolific investors.

A big thank you goes to our amazing judges who gave their time and gave such valuable feedback to the startups.

Thank you to:

• Jason Calacanis - This Week in Startups
• Christine Tsai - Founding Partner, 500 Global
• Byron Deeter - Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners

2021 Winner - Vien Health

Industry: HealthTech. Location: Texas, USA

Founder: Gersom Adu

Quick Pitch:

Vien Health is an inspired team with a mission to transform the health of everyone, everywhere, through the best possible medicine. We provide a comprehensive virtual care solution that connects trusted health organizations, doctors and patients across the continent of Africa with end-to-end electronic health record system.

How do they use Twilio:

Our entire tele-health stack is built on Twilio. From video, audio and chat to appointment management system to notifications. All of it is built on Twilio.

Website: https://vienhealth.com

Runners Up (2)

Industry: Travel. Location: Vidigueira, Portugal

Founder: Tiago Araújo

Quick Pitch:

HiJiffy is an AI-powered communications platform designed to help hotels increase direct bookings and improve customer care.

How do they use Twilio:

Integrated with Whatsapp and SMS channels on our conversational platform - Click-to-call feature for guests to contact the hotels - Virtual concierge messaging campaigns on WhatsApp and SMS, to enable hotels to send messages in the different phases of the guest journey

Website: https://hijiffy.com

Industry: AI, Communications. Location: Christchurch, New Zealand

Founder: Luke Campbell

Quick Pitch:

Vxt is your hub for all things communications. We combine your calls with powerful workflow automation so that admin work is a thing of the past.

How do they use Twilio:

We have used Twilio throughout our startup journey for everything from authentication, and call handling to MVP development.

Website: https://vxt.co.nz

Finalists

Industry: HealthTech. Location: Dublin, Ireland

Founder: James McGann

Quick Pitch:

A personalized mental health guide in your pocket.

Frankie is a two-sided B2B mental health platform for modern teams and mental health service providers. Frankie intelligently connects team members suffering from anxiety, stress, depression, and burnout to a diverse range of support that is personalized to the individual. Frankie uses clinical assessments to measure effectiveness and to provide mental health insights to close the blind spots of remote and hybrid teams.

How do they use Twilio:

We use Twilio's Programmable video Web RTC.

Website: https://www.frankie.health

Industry: Communications. Location: Manchester, U.K.

Founder: Sam Gillingham

Quick Pitch:

VoiceIQ is the intelligent phone system for businesses that need to automate the busy work and capture every insight from every call.

How do you use Twilio:

We have built an intelligent phone system that utilises Twilio’s programmable voice to make outbound calls and receive inbound calls. As mentioned above, we provide our customers with real time features and to enable this, we process the audio stream available via the Twilio Programmable Voice JS Client SDK. We also make sure of SIP domains provided by Twilio to enable forwarding of calls from other PSTN networks into Twilio’s VoIP infrastructure. This then routes the call into VoiceIQ’s application.

Website: https://voiceiq.ai/

Industry: LegalTech. Location: Dublin, Ireland.

Founder: Aida Lutaj

Quick Pitch:

Notarize documents on line remotely anytime anywhere

How do you use Twilio:

We leverage with Twilio's SendGrid service for email notifications - document management, service payment and the audio & video session that allows Legitify's solution to connect a notary with a customer and finally have the notarization happening. This last piece of the solution has been completely developed on top of Twilio Programmable Video and Twilio Conversations.

Website: https://legitify.eu

Industry: Developer Tools, Low-code. Location: Delaware, USA.

Founder: Harini Janakiraman

Quick Pitch:

Open-source low-code platform to help you build on the Google Cloud Platform fast. We make GCP as easy as ABC.

How do you use Twilio:

Ready-made flexible extension for developers to use SendGrid and Twilio on Google Cloud Platform easily and visually. Developers can add these extensions with a one-click button on their database to be triggered when any data field changes. This is powerful and creates a frictionless experience for developers to use Twilio and SendGrid on their databases without any boiler plate code, worrying about installing and deploying using CLIs on terminals.

Website: https://rowy.io/

Industry: EdTech. Location: Texas, USA.

Founder: Fredrick Burns

One Line Pitch:

Safer Management sells attendance & safety software to public school districts and colleges.

How do you use Twilio:

Many of our core features are dependent on Twilio and SendGrid's APIs. Each morning parents and students receive a daily health screening link via email or SMS through the Twilio & SendGrid restful API. If a user responds to the survey stating they are feeling ill, an SMS and email are sent to the medical administrator of that student school. The alert happens in real-time allowing the medical admin to be proactive.

Website: https://safermgmt.com/

Industry: E-commerce, Retail. Location: Caesarea, Israel.

Founder: Gill Bar-Yoseph

Quick Pitch:

Voiceable helps online retailers recreate the in-store experience using voice and video, providing customers with tailored guidance directly from the retailer website. This unique customer engagement allows Voiceable to provide retailers with in-depth conversational intelligence.

How do you use Twilio:

Voiceable uses Twilio's voice and video communication APIs to provide online retailers with unique customer engagement.

Website: https://voiceable.co

Industry: Saas, IT service, Support. Location: New York, USA

Founder: Mark Alayev

Quick Pitch:

Chatgenie gives technology teams the tools they need to provide exceptional customer service. Through the power of chat and automation, teams can directly help and assist their customers with the correct knowledge and context.

How do you use Twilio:

We are utilizing Twilio for real time chat capabilities and SendGrid for for authentication and other user notifications. Thanks to Twilio, our users get instant replies in the browser and on their mobile phone. Making sure that the customer experience is always fast and reliable.

Website: https://chatgenie.io/

Industry: Customer engagement & success. Location: Boston, USA

Founder: Jessica Lynch

Quick Pitch:

Wishroute increase revenue for D2C companies through human, text message conversations designed for habit change. Wishroute enables companies to proactively support customers with 1-1 conversations when high touch support matters most, increasing conversion, retention and brand loyalty. AI turns Wishroute’s human support guides into superhumans, able to handle any scale and deliver a positive ROI.

How do you use Twilio:

We use Twilio for all of our SMS delivery & SendGrid for all our email engagement.

Website: https://wishroute.com/

Industry: Entertainment. Location: Sydney / Los Angeles / London

Founder: Jared Kristensen

Quick Pitch:

Audience Republic is an all-in-one marketing platform for creators (events, musicians, athletes, streamers). We help creators sell more (event tickets, live streams, merch, memberships, digital goods) by enabling them to own & reach their audience - so they're less dependent on social platforms. We integrate with major commerce platforms - e.g. Shopify, Patreon, Eventbrite.

How do you use Twilio:

Our all-in-one messaging platform allows creators to send marketing emails and text messages. We have integrated with the Twilio and Sendgrid APIs to achieve this.

Website: https://audiencerepublic.com

Industry: Martech. Location: Atlanta, USA

Founder: Greg Chen

Quick Pitch:

Mobiz is a mobile engagement SaaS that enables businesses to seamlessly build 1:1 content personalised SMS landing page campaigns at scale. Furthermore, all engagements are tracked on a per customer level, providing key information for targeted re-engagement. Mobiz also provides a growing library of beautifully curated templates that helps drive increased ROI for our users. 60% of all business text message contains a link, and we are here to make this type of engagement much more meaningful.

How do you use Twilio:

We utilise Twilio in several key areas of our product to enable account creation, A2P 10DLC registration, SMS delivery, and compliantly grow mobile contactable audience by our customers: - Automated 10DLC, Toll-free sub-account assignment - A2P 10DLC business registration - SMS sending - Keyword response

Website: https://mobiz.co

Industry: Mentoring. Location: Melbourne, Australia

Founders: Lisa Teh, Nick Bell

Quick Pitch:

Lisnic, a life-changing global platform connecting Mentees and Mentors.

It does this by allow mentees from anywhere in the world to post a request and have top rated mentors from around the globe submit an offer for that request. All sessions are then conducted through the sites in-built video conferencing software powered by Twilio.

How do you use Twilio:

Twilio technology is at the core of Lisnic’s services. * Twilio powers our one-on-one and group mentoring sessions that connect our Mentees with their Mentors * Twilio’s SendGrid system alerts platform users of their activity and notifications

Website: https://lisnic.com/

Industry: Agtech. Location: Mendoza, Argentina

Founder: Maria Fernanda Bonesso

Quick Pitch:

We developed a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud platform of technology that facilitates direct-to-toe food marketing, linking efficiently, intelligently and fairly, to all the players in the food production and supply chain.

How do you use Twilio:

Our api that integrates both sengrid and twilio to send notifications, we use the Javascript sdk of both to integrate it with our api in node. In the case of sendgrid we use its template engine for emails.

Website: https://agrojusto.com.ar