Unifonic, dubbed the Twilio of emerging markets, closes $21M Series A round

Those of you familiar with the incredible rise of Twilio, which came along to utterly disrupt the communications world, will be interested to hear that another player plans to do the same, but this time in the staid and tricky area of emerging markets. Unifonic, which has been dubbed “the Twilio of emerging markets” has today closed a $21M Series A funding round led by Saudi Technology Ventures (STV), and the emerging market specialist fund Endeavor Catalyst, which is backed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, among others. They now regularly compete against their European counterpart, MessageBird, which recently raised $60M (led by Accel and Atomico), and their US benchmark, Twilio. The product suite is designed for both the non-tech-savvy with last-mile tools already built to plug and play, localized to telecom infrastructure, hosted on multiple clouds, geographically in the region, to increase reliability and minimize latency so transactions are processed in milliseconds.” In a joint statement Reid Hoffman, Linkedin co-founder and chairman of Endeavor Catalyst and Linda Rottenberg, Endeavor’s Co-founder and CEO said: “Endeavor selects and connects the most promising global companies and entrepreneurs with experienced business advisors to help drive growth and economic development around the world. As I wrote last year, Middle East startups are growing fast, and that’s even before the flying taxis arrive.