Chicago
telnyx.com
Q: Please tell us about your company history. When was it founded? How has the company evolved since its founding? Have your services changed? Are there key milestones in your company’s history and growth that you can highlight?
Telnyx was founded in 2009 by CEO David Casem and COO Ian Reither as a lifestyle consultancy, specializing in call center system installations. From 2010 to 2013, we evolved into the business of reselling voice minutes, becoming a fully licensed telecommunications carrier along the way.
In early 2013, we incorporated as Telnyx LLC, and made our first strategic hires to help scale our business as a wholesale VoIP carrier. By late 2013, we made regulatory and technical strides that granted us access to core telephony resources and capabilities. This evolution allowed us to switch and route calls over our own proprietary software—the first iteration of our telephony engine.
In early 2014, we reinforced our core mission: to make universal communications possible, by converging the models of telecom equipment manufacturers and telecom carriers. This enhanced focus came in part from our participation in Techstars, the prestigious accelerator program for high-potential startups. In mid-2014, we graduated from the Techstars program, securing venture funding in the process.
Since 2015, we’ve worked tirelessly to build our own global IP communications network from the ground up, adding points of presence (PoPs) across the globe, and establishing direct interconnections with Tier-1 carriers to provide truly global coverage.
In 2016, we launched the Mission Control Portal enabling our customers to control, configure and monitor everything about their communications through one pane of glass. In the same year, we launched the Telnyx API, exposing every configuration option of the portal through a set of REST API endpoints and empowering developers everywhere to build communications applications without worrying about complex telephony engineering.
In 2016, we opened our second headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. This office has since grown to house more than 30 employees and is home to our network operations center (NOC), which provides award-winning on-call support 24/7/365 to every customer.
In 2018, we launched Programmable SMS, making further strides toward being a truly universal communications provider. Since launch, Programmable SMS has evolved into an omnichannel messaging platform, empowering businesses to connect with their customers across SMS, MMS, V-SMS, RCS and WhatsApp, with staggering delivery, open and response rates.
In 2019, we launched Call Control, the most configurable and granular Voice API on the market. Since then, developers all over the world have built intelligent voice applications in conversational AI, marketing analytics, contact center software and more.
Q: Please tell us about company’s top executives and the work that they are doing in our industry.
David Casem, a self-taught engineer and entrepreneur, is the co-founder and CEO of Telnyx. David built Telnyx starting with only open-source software and a license from the FCC. Today, Telnyx continues to expand its product offerings and reach via the most direct intercontinental interconnections. David continues to craft Telnyx’s strategic vision and is a hands-on leader in every facet of the organization.
David has 12 years of industry expertise and represents Telnyx as a voting member of the North American Numbering Council (NANC), where he remains active in many industry-changing conversations including those relating to Nationwide Number Portability. In addition, David maintains an active role in various ATIS groups, including the ATIS/SIP Forum IP-NNI Task Force (IPNNI), the group primarily responsible for STIR/SHAKEN standards.
He has previously participated on the ATIS Industry Numbering Committee (INC) and in iconectiv’s Common Interest Group on Routing and Rating (CIGRR). Telnyx maintains a dedicated presence in both of these groups.
Ian Reither is the co-founder and COO of Telnyx. Ian worked alongside David to build Telnyx from a small consultancy specializing in call center installations to a global communications platform with over 200 employees.
Ian was instrumental in refining the Telnyx vision, helping to guide the company through Techstars, and securing its initial funding and customers.
Q: Explain your geographic reach. Where do you provide services?
Telnyx is a true global carrier, offering services in 222 countries and territories. Our fully-owned infrastructure in data centers constitutes a purpose-built, global communications network—spanning ten points-of-presence (PoPs) in six countries across four continents. Our network is multi-cloud and runs separately from the public internet, giving our customers unparalleled quality, availability and scalability anywhere on earth.
Telnyx has direct access to telephony assets and resources as a licensed operator in 25 countries, including the U.S., U.K., Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Spain and Ireland. This licensed operator status allows us to function as a peer with the largest network operators on earth, reinforcing our commitment to quality and reliability for our customers across the globe.
Q: What types of products and/or services do you offer your customers?
Our products have a singular focus: to enable you to communicate across channels, countries and platforms.
We build APIs and tools that developers can use to harness the full power of our network, plugging into complex telephony and regulatory environments to build communications with staggering simplicity. Some examples include:
- Omnichannel messaging including SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, RCS and a dedicated Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) API.
- Programmable Voice over Elastic SIP Trunks and WebRTC, with next-generation features like speech-to-text transcription, real-time media streaming, programmable recording, and more.
- Programmable IoT, unlocking global connectivity to multiple carriers via a single SIM card.
- Programmable Fax, enabling secure, configurable faxing over our private IP network via a set of simple HTTP endpoints—no fax machine required.
- Lookup API, empowering you with the full details of any phone number, anywhere, including line type, carrier, caller ID, portability, LRN and more.
- Virtual Cross Connects (VxCs) for direct private connections to our network from every major cloud provider, giving you unmatched low latency.
The Mission Control Portal is our intuitive, award-winning user interface, giving you complete visibility and control over your communications in one place.
We’re always building the experimenting to bring the next generation of communication to our customers. In the near future, we’ll be introducing a video platform that empowers developers to build bespoke video experiences with our assured quality, reliability, low-latency, and granularity.
Q: What is your target customer base? Please include names of prominent customers and case study details.
Our customers span a plethora of industry verticals and use cases, but they all have one thing in common—they want to make communications simpler for their customers.
Conversational AI & Voice Analytics providers like Replicant are building the world’s first automated contact center on the Telnyx Voice API, leveraging our super low-latency media access to build automated AI voice responders for contact centers across the globe.
Enterprise SaaS providers like Lightspeed are leveraging Telnyx for Elastic SIP Trunking, connecting their global offices and customers with reliable, unified, single-carrier simplicity and cost-savings.
Leading communications platforms like Ooma are streamlining their communications with Telnyx, combining voice, SMS and number lookup capabilities under one carrier for unified management and configuration, and granular control.
Customer engagement platforms are building the next generation of customer experience using omnichannel messaging. Point Blank Political are driving higher deliverability at lower cost for political campaign outreach. FreedomPark moved their SMS infrastructure seamlessly to the cloud, unlocking endless scalability while continuing to deliver a best-in-class valet parking experience.
Small businesses and independent consultancies love Telnyx for our award-winning support, easy configurability through the Mission Control Portal, and lower pricing, all thanks to our fully-owned global private communications network. For Willie Howe Technology, these benefits have helped to supply SIP Trunking and VoIP solutions to customers across the globe.
Q: What are the biggest challenges that your company faces and how is your company overcoming these challenges?
With a voting presence on several industry boards and panels, Telnyx has contributed a huge amount to the effort to combat spam and fraud in communications. Industry initiatives like SHAKEN/STIR for voice calling and A2P 10DLC for messaging have been largely informed by the experiences of our customers, and our advocacy for them in industry discussions.
Aside from working closely with regulatory and industry bodies, Telnyx is overcoming the challenge of spam and fraud through product development. We’re building frameworks, product offerings and APIs to empower our customers to navigate murky and fluid regulatory landscapes, including intuitive tools to ensure 10DLC compliance for your messaging campaigns, and upcoming tools to ensure your voice calls are compliant with SHAKEN/STIR.
Telnyx is proud to be a leading voice in discussions around SHAKEN/STIR compliance. We’re petitioning incumbent telco providers to update their infrastructure in order to ensure the initiative is successful in its effort to stop robocalling. Incumbent providers are unilaterally routing a majority of traffic from interconnected VoIP providers over legacy interconnections, stripping that traffic of associated SHAKEN/STIR data, rendering it non-compliant and susceptible to robocalling vulnerabilities. We’re urging these incumbent telco providers to make next-generation IP interconnects available to us and other interconnected VoIP providers, to ensure industry-wide compliance and prevent our customers from receiving robocalls.
Q: What are your competitive advantages; what sets you apart from other companies?
Telnyx is the only API-enabled communications platform that owns a purpose-built, private, global network, built from the ground-up for real-time communications. The benefits of our network can be felt by our customers in every part of their communications.
Our in-house product support engineers can provide award-winning 24/7/365 support to our customers, solving problems quickly without needing to consult with downstream network middlemen or number aggregators. Moreover, Telnyx has direct access to numbering resources in 142 countries and counting. This means the same first-class support, fast resolutions and Tier-1 carrier-grade quality that our customers have come to expect from our domestic offerings are available across the globe, allowing our customers to scale their communications worldwide.
Our customers can save an average of 30% when they switch from other communications providers, because we cut out network middlemen and pass the cost savings on to you.
Our call quality and reliability are second to none, because your calls run on a private IP backbone across our network, away from the latency and packet loss that are common on the public internet.
Q: How is the evolving communications marketplace impacting your business model?
We’re at the forefront of democratizing communications. We empower our customers to build bespoke communications solutions, and we’re committed to becoming the platform for the next generation of intelligent communications applications. Our global, purpose-built network, combined with our thoughtful, granular APIs to harness the power of that network, will give developers everywhere the control and configurability to build the future of communications.
Q: Have you recently acquired new customers? Entered new markets? Added new services/products? If so, please provide details.
Our recent product launches unlock a wealth of new opportunities for our customers to harness the power of our global private network for their communications.
With Telnyx Wireless, customers can build the next generation of IoT capabilities, handling data transfer on a private LTE network, or intelligently auto-connecting to the best available network from over 200 carriers across the globe from a single SIM card. With pay-as-you-go pricing and zone-based billing, Wireless unlocks cost savings and unmatched flexibility for IoT applications.
The launch of the Telnyx Programmable Fax API enabled smoother integration and more flexibility in customers using the Telnyx network to send and receive faxes over Elastic SIP Trunks. Our API-enabled Fax offering allows customers in compliant spaces like healthcare and financial services to have greater control over their communications, without the need for a dedicated fax machine or a third-party fax interface.
Telnyx Verify, our most recent new product launch, allows customers to build two-factor authentication (2FA) applications, sending 2FA codes by SMS or by automated voice calls. Verify also enables 2FA over Google RCS Business Chat or Verified SMS (VSMS), giving customers greater peace of mind through branded, rich messaging experiences.
Alongside these new product launches, we’ve grown our international presence with new feature development and network presence. Recent launches in Australia and the UK have been accompanied by multi-currency billing options, local network PoPs, and dedicated support teams to ensure a frictionless experience.
Q: Describe your relationship with INCOMPAS. How long have you been a member? Why did you decide to join the association? What are you looking to gain from your INCOMPAS membership (policy advocacy, new business, networking, education, etc.)?
Telnyx joined INCOMPAS in March, 2021 in an effort to leverage INCOMPAS’s policy advocacy expertise to drive forward-thinking solutions in our industry. These solutions include driving further industry consensus around TRACED Act related FCC mandates as well as creating competitive opportunities to make IP interconnection more readily available. Additionally, Telnyx hopes to develop stronger relationships with our industry partners, working toward a common goal of better serving our customers with communications.
Q: How have you benefited from INCOMPAS membership (e.g. finding strategic partners, growing sales, networking, etc.)? Please provide as many details as possible.
Thus far, Telnyx has been excited to participate in the Robocalling Working Group to discuss current concerns regarding blocking foreign provider traffic that do not participate in SHAKEN/STIR and/or have a robocall mitigation plan on file. In addition, we have been impressed with the willingness of INCOMPAS staff to meet with Telnyx to discuss our industry goals and incorporating our thoughts into working group agendas.