OREANDA-NEWS. Twilio Inc. (NYSE: TWLO), a leading cloud communications platform company, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire proprietary WebRTC media processing technologies built by the team behind the popular Kurento Open Source Project. Upon completion of this transaction, the team behind Kurento will join Twilio to lead the integration of the new technologies and enable the development of advanced video in web and mobile applications. 

Over the next several months following the close of the transaction, the Kurento Media Server capabilities including large group communications, transcoding, recording and advanced media processing will be integrated into Twilio Programmable Video. These new capabilities will enable developers to address the more advanced needs of enterprise and large-scale consumer video applications as well as next-generation video applications such as those involved in augmented reality, computer vision, robotics, and the Internet of Things.

To date, the adoption of video communication has been largely limited to conferencing systems and face-to-face applications for consumers. This is because advanced uses of video that require real-time media processing have been out of reach for mobile and web developers. While the popular WebRTC standard equips developers with client-side technology for adding video, the requisite media server infrastructure is expensive and requires specific technical expertise to implement. The addition of advanced WebRTC media server technology to the Twilio Video platform will change this by enabling API access to real-time media processing. Developers will soon have the ability to analyze, transform, augment, and store audio and video streams to power diverse video applications.

"When we started the Kurento project, we wanted to create a powerful media processing engine built for the world of WebRTC. We knew it would only be successful if we delivered this capability as a cloud service and gave it to developers through a simple and well-built API," said Luis Lopez, CEO and co-founder of the Kurento project. "Twilio has one of the best sets of APIs and joining forces with their team enables us to complete this vision and bring our work to Twilio's million plus registered developer accounts."

"Twilio and the team behind Kurento share a common vision of enabling developers through powerful platforms and straight-forward APIs," said Jeff Lawson, Twilio CEO and co-founder. "As Twilio takes another step on our mission to fuel the future of communications by enabling developers, we're excited to join forces with the builders of Kurento to extend the uses of our video platform. We can't wait to see what developers will build next."

Tikal Technologies, S.L., who originally developed Kurento, will maintain the Kurento Open Source project, and be responsible for managing contributions from the Kurento community. Twilio will work diligently alongside Tikal to maintain and improve the project. This means stabilizing core Kurento functionality, maintaining compatibility with all major WebRTC-compatible browsers, and listening closely to the feedback from the Kurento community. Twilio intends to make sure that the Kurento open source project is a stable foundation for media processing applications into the future.

As part of today's announcement, Twilio is also announcing the planned addition of a new office in Madrid, Spain, the home of the Kurento team. The opening of Twilio's office in Spain will be another step in addressing the global needs of Twilio's customers. The Madrid office will join Twilio's headquarters in San Francisco and additional offices in Bogot?, Dublin, Hong Kong, London, Mountain View, Munich, New York City, Singapore and Tallinn.

The proposed transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2016. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Twilio is not updating its guidance for the full year ending Dec. 31, 2016, which it provided on Aug. 8, 2016. The proposed acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on Twilio's results of operations or financial condition for the full year ending Dec. 31, 2016.

About Twilio
Twilio's mission is to fuel the future of communications. Developers and businesses use Twilio to make communications relevant and contextual by embedding messaging, voice, and video capabilities directly into their software applications. Founded in 2008, Twilio has over 650 employees, with headquarters in San Francisco and other offices in Bogot?, Dublin, Hong Kong, London, Mountain View, Munich, New York City, Singapore and Tallinn.