Silicon Valley’s Twilio buys Brazilian startup, Teravoz

Contxto – This week, Brazilian startup Teravoz announced it’s been acquired by Silicon Valley-based Twilio. While it’s unknown how much was paid to complete the acquisition. Regardless, according to the startup’s announcement, it was agreed that Teravoz would change its name to Twilio Brazil.

With the sale, previous investors such as Canary and Wayra can make their exit.

Internet-based communication calls

Tiago Bruni Tawil, Evandro Saroka, and Thiago Fernandes founded the startup in 2014. From its headquarters in São Paulo, Teravoz developed APIs for communication. Specifically, it looked into creating a more seamless and automated customer experience to a company’s private branch exchange (PBX).

In other words, Teravoz helps businesses connect their telephone network with other applications. Examples include help desks and messaging systems like Slack. Not to mention it also provides APIs for dialers and real-time monitoring of calls.

Throughout its six-year run, it provided APIs for large Brazilian startups such as Loft and Nubank. However, it had always been important for Teravoz to work with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as well.

The future of phone calls

Nobody likes to receive service or marketing calls. And from what I’ve heard, phone agents don’t have it easy either. 

However, technology is being developed to make it a more painless process for both businesses and the people who receive calls. 

Twilio, a publicly-traded company focused on developing cloud communication platforms saw the intrinsic value Teravoz could add to a business’ staff and operations with its multiple API offerings.

Then there are other startups like Puerto Rican VOIQ and Mexican Atexto. They’re developing products stemming from machine-learning to add more human responses to automated service calls and bots.

But some businesses are going even further.

Some call centers use artificial intelligence (AI) to detect a person’s emotions, based on their tone over the phone. As a result, the agent can adapt their approach towards the recipient based on if the person sounds happy, tired, angry, etc.

It’s just another arrow in their customer experience quiver.

But there’s no technology out there that can make me happy to receive a marketing call for a credit card I don’t need.

-ML