Twilio adds Atlanta office to expand its reach in the Southeast

Cloud communications company Twilio today announced that it is adding an office in Atlanta. The office will house sales, human resources, and engineering staff, and the company expects to hire more than 50 employees there over the next 1-2 years, according to a Twilio spokesperson.

“[Atlanta] has one of the highest concentration of Fortune 500 companies, so it made sense to be closer to our customers,” Twilio’s Southeast sales director, Doug Barnes, told VentureBeat in a phone interview. He added that Georgia Institute of Technology, also located in Atlanta, has historically been an important hiring source for the company, though its graduates have always had to move out to the Bay Area to work for Twilio.

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“One of the things we really wanted to do as we grew is to make sure that we had a diversity of talent, and diversity in the places that we were employing folks, so that was a part of the motivation.”

Headquartered in San Francisco, Twilio also has U.S. offices in New York and in Mountain View, California. The company has more than 1,000 employees, the majority of whom are based in the Bay Area.

Atlanta has historically been a popular expansion location for companies that want a foothold in the Southeast, as the area is home to 26 Fortune 1000 companies, along with a number of universities with strong technical programs. Other tech companies that have recently opened a new office or expanded operations in the city include Opendoor, Pandora, and Square. The city is also still in the running for Amazon’s second headquarters (HQ2).