Surge

Active

Stripe for telephony

Fall 2024Founded 20243 peopleLehi, UT, USA

surge.app ↗LinkedIn ↗X ↗GitHub ↗See on the Idea Map B2B momentum

About

Surge is Stripe for telephony. Our team has experience building telephony software at billion dollar scale. Because of increased regulation, Twilio and other SMS APIs take weeks to onboard new customers, but we can get startups onboarded same day. Surge wins by enabling easy carrier registration, better support, and higher level APIs and no code UI components to make implementation easier for startups and developers.

From their website

as of Jun 7, 2026surge.app ↗

API/InfraSubscription · Pricing described as simple with a free trial; no explicit price points shown in the text

Surge is an SMS API platform for developers that emphasizes speed, ease of use, and simple pricing. It focuses on rapid carrier registration, a developer-friendly API, and embeddable UI components to add messaging features quickly.

Surge offers an SMS API designed for developers with fast carrier registration (claimed 72 hours or less), an intuitive API, embeddable UI components, registration templates, and no-code message blasts. The product emphasizes easier integration, simpler pricing, and a dashboard for managing messaging, with plans described as easy to try and a free trial.

Who it’s for: developers building apps that need SMS capabilities and quick carrier onboarding

Features

fast carrier registration
intuitive developer API
embeddable UI components
registration templates
no-code message blasts
link shortening for deliverability
support for multiple messaging channels (SMS first, with future channels)

traffic to pricing/docs; emphasis on try-for-free and developer-oriented UX

Founders · 2

Dennis BeattyFounder

Founder/CEO at Surge (F24), the easiest way for developers to send text messages. Formerly principal engineer over payments at Entrata and early engineer at Podium (W16) where I was a tech lead and senior engineer over the messaging platform and led engineering for the SMS payments product that reached a $2B run rate in year 2.

LinkedIn ↗X ↗

Brett BeattyFounder

Co-Founder/CTO at Surge (F24), the easiest way to add text messaging to software. Prior to Surge, I spent six years at Podium (W16) where I was a senior engineer on the Phones team and the account structure team, building the APIs upon which the rest of Podium's products were built. I was very focused on providing five nines of uptime and sub-millisecond response times.

LinkedIn ↗X ↗

Launch

Launched on Y Combinator · Nov 2024

View launch post ↗

Get registered and sending text messages faster than ever before.

Surge offers an SMS texting platform for developers, handling carrier registration and compliance to speed up onboarding. It provides a REST API, webhooks, low-code UI components, and white-glove onboarding to enable quick setup and testing for sending and receiving texts.