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Communications services company Twilio Inc. put a smile on the face of shareholders once again today, posting third-quarter results that breezed past expectations.

The company also reported strong growth on the customer acquisition front, further cheering investors, who sent Twilio’s stock soaring by more than 12 percent in after-hours trading. Update: Shares rocketed more than 35 percent Wednesday, to $96.19, on a massive post-election day for the overall market.

Twilio, which sells cloud-based communications services in the form of application programming interfaces to help enterprises manage their text and telephone infrastructure, reported a net loss of $27.1 million, or 28 cents per share. Earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation came in at 7 cents per share, with revenue hitting $168.9 million, up 68 percent from one year ago.

The numbers far exceeded analysts’ predictions for the quarter. Wall Street was hoping for earnings before certain costs of just 2 cents per share on revenue of $160.4 million.

The quarter shows that Twilio is firing on all cylinders as it nears its goal of becoming a profitable company, addressing key challenges such as building up its customer base, scaling up its business and absorbing the cost of the infrastructure required to do that.

Things are looking especially good on the customer acquisition front. According to Twilio co-founder and Chief Executive Jeff Lawson, the company added almost 4,000 new customers in the quarter and now boasts 61,153 active accounts in total, up from 46,489 a year ago.

One reason for so many new customers is that enterprises are racing to build new, next generation applications in order to differentiate and remain competitive in this era of digital disruption, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE. Such use cases almost always involve phone calls and other smartphone digital exhaust that needs to be managed and operated, he added.

“Enter Twilio and it keeps growing fast,” Mueller said. “It’s good to see the company growing by sixty-plus percent and not widening the loss amount, so things may well be turning around.”

Twilio’s Lawson indicated that things were “turning around” with his own comments: “We’re thrilled to report yet another strong quarter for revenue growth, product innovation and customer success in Q3,” Lawson said in a statement. “There are several key issues on the minds of many companies today – creating seamless omni-channel experiences, ensuring enterprise compliance, and utilizing artificial intelligence and bots to create better customer experiences.”

Twilio has been trying to address some of these customer issues with nonstop updates to its platform and services. In the last quarter, it introduced a tool called Autopilot, which is a programmable conversational artificial intelligence platform for building custom bots for chat, interactive voice systems on telephone and home assistance apps. The company also made a notable acquisition of cloud email services provider SendGrid Inc. for a cool $2 billion.

With these continued updates, Twilio looks to be fighting fit, ready for another successful quarter to cap off the year. The company is predicting adjusted earnings of between 3 and 4 cents per share on revenue of $183 million to $185 million for the fourth quarter. Wall Street analysts had pegged the company’s earnings at just 2 cents per share on revenue of $161.3 million.

Image: Ken Yeung/Flickr