Twilio Startup Labs Founder Spotlight: Alex Levin & Rebecca Greene, Regal.io

Twilio Startup Labs Founder Spotlight: Alex Levin & Rebecca Greene, Regal.io

Company Name: Regal.io
Founder Name(s): Alex Levin & Rebecca Greene
LinkedIn: Regal.io Company Page
Industry: Enterprise SaaS, AI-enabled telephone & sales automation
Stage/Funding: Regal.io has raised $42.1 million through Seed and Series A funding rounds
Location: New York, NY

This is a post in a series of interviews with startup founders who have worked with Twilio Startup Labs, a program for developers at early-stage startups to learn how to build, prototype, and demo on Twilio. We had the pleasure of working with Alex Levin & Rebecca Greene on their startup, Regal.io. 

Describe your company (Startup) journey in 160 characters or less (the original length of a text message)

Regal.io is a phone & SMS outreach platform enabling $200M+/month revenue driven. Regal’s AI-enabled tools enable high-answering and high-converting funnels.

Why did you start your company?

Before founding Regal.io, we were executives at Angi (NASDAQ: ANGI) and Handy (acquired by ANGI in 2018).

While at Angi, our team successfully drove top-of-funnel growth, but even after rolling out website optimization and email/SMS re-marketing, only about four of 100 customers would convert. We found that if we called the 96% “abandoned” customers and got them on the phone, they loved the attention, and converted at double the rate. This was the genesis of Regal.io.

Knowing that legacy outbound contact center software only enables a "call more" or "call faster" strategy — which results in poor answer rates, low on-call conversion, and a terrible customer experience — we set about to develop a better approach. Regal uses real-time customer behaviors to personalize outreach, increase conversion, and boost revenue. Regal’s outbound phone and SMS sales solution empowers B2C brands to add a human touch at critical moments in their online experience, such as when customers “abandon” the sign-up or checkout flow. The solution helps win over customers, exceed expectations and drive more revenue. High-growth brands including Angi, Career Karma, Fidelity Life, RefiJet, Ro, SoFi, and The Farmer’s Dog use Regal to increase sales and improve customer retention.

How are you building on Twilio? E.g., how do you use email, SMS, WhatsApp, Verify, etc. to communicate with your customers?

We leverage Twilio’s APIs for programmable voice and conferences to power calls, transfers and voicemail drops. And we leverage Twilio’s programmable SMS and conversations service to power triggered SMS and agent-customer conversations. We’ve also built our routing rules which determine which customers speak with which agents, using Twilio’s task router as the backbone.

What has the benefit or commercial impact been for your business since using Twilio?

Twilio’s APIs and components allowed us to get to market faster. It’s so easy to build on top of, and we could launch much faster than if we built everything in house. It also enabled us to learn from Twilio’s experience and design paradigms while allowing us to focus our engineering resources on our key differentiators (rather than problems that had already been solved).

By building on Twilio, what has the impact been for your customers?

Our iteration times are faster, and customers benefit from that. When a customer requests a feature like barge or pay with IVR, we’re already 50% of the way toward delivering the feature, even if it wasn’t on our roadmap.

Are there any future Twilio Products that you plan to integrate into your startup, and if so, why?

We are starting to experiment with Twilio’s Answering Machine Detection service as we build out more sophisticated dialers to automatically detect when a voice mail vs. human answers a call - in order to save agents time and avoid them listening to dial tones and voicemails.

Do you have a recording of your DEMO and how you are using Twilio that you would like to share below?

What is the best piece of advice you would give to founders who are looking to build on Twilio?

Don’t spend too much time thinking about whether to build something yourself or use a Twilio solution; the answer is if Twilio makes it easier and faster to build, just go with that - even if it’s not exactly how you would have thought about the solution. It will allow you to focus your engineering time on your differentiation and validating the core hypotheses of your business. Otherwise, building voice and SMS products is very time-consuming, technical, and hard to test and debug - don’t underestimate how challenging it is and how much Twilio abstracts away the hard parts.

What excites you most about being a founder?

We have always believed that when you make customers successful, they will make you successful. We built the company on our value of ‘Customers are Royalty,’ and it’s a major part of our success. Since the company’s founding in 2020, Regal has driven over $2 billion in revenue for its customers. The platform has powered more than 50 million customer conversations, helping more than 150 brands drive an average 25%+ lift in revenue.

We’re incredibly proud of the company we have built! We remain excited about fulfilling our mission of treating our customers like Royalty.

Thank you for reading. If you would like to read more Twilio Startup Labs Founder Spotlight interviews and learn how others build, prototype, and demo on Twilio, please check out the series of articles here.

For questions about Twilio Startup Labs or to learn how to get involved, please contact Frank Y. Owusu at fyawowusu@twilio.com. 

To find out more about how Twilio supports Startups, check out Grow with Twilio.