Twilio competitor Bandwidth up 6% following IPO

Bandwidth, a company that helps businesses with voice and text communication, debuted on the Nasdaq on Friday, going up about 6 percent on its first day of trading. After pricing its IPO at the bottom of the expected range at $20 per share, the company closed Friday at $21.19, or up about 6 percent.

The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company raised $80 million in its offering. Bandwidth, which previously bootstrapped, will be using the capital for hiring and R&D.

Bandwidth has been “cash flow positive and profitable for a long time,” co-founder and CEO David Morken told TechCrunch. He started the company in 1999 and then later started Republic Wireless, a wireless provider division that was recently spun off as a separate company.

Bandwidth competes with Twilio and Nexmo, which it claims “offer a narrower set of software APIs, less robust customer support and fewer other features while relying on third-party networks and physical infrastructure.”

It also competes with AT&T, Level 3 and Verizon, which it characterizes as “network service providers that offer limited developer functionality on top of their own networks and physical infrastructure.”

Bandwidth says it has been able to convince 865 large enterprises, including GoDaddy and ZipRecruiter, that its API integrations are better quality, in part because it has its own voice network.

Bandwidth brought in $152.1 million in revenue last year. This compares to $137.8 million in 2015.

For 2016, the company had $22.4 million in profit; 2015 had a loss of $6.7 million.

TechCrunch is owned by Verizon, which does business in the same space as Bandwidth.