Bengaluru, NFA Post: Cloud companies booming during the pandemic, which was not expected by most the OEMs, on the golden times to come so fast. Cloud communications business Twilio has agreed to acquire customer data infrastructure company Segment for $3.2 billion.
Segment and its CEO Peter Reinhardt didn’t respond to requests for comment. A Twilio spokesperson said the company couldn’t comment “on any rumors or speculation.”
Twilio’s main focus since it launched in 2008 has been on making it easy to embed communications functionality into any app. The company signaled a switch in direction when it released the Flex customer service API in March 2018. Later that same year, it bought SendGrid, an email marketing API company for $2 billion.
Twilio was founded in 2008 by Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis and was originally based in both Seattle, Washington, and San Francisco, California.
Twilio, which trades at a market capitalization of more than $45 billion, went public in June 2016 on the strength of communications infrastructure that allows businesses to reach their customers through text messages, voice and video calls. The company counts the likes of the American Red Cross, delivery unicorn Deliveroo and bank ING as customers.as per Forbes.
The acquisition comes almost two years to the date after Twilio announced it would acquire API provider SendGrid for $2 billion in stock. By the time the deal closed in January 2019, with the help of a fateful breakfast burrito, that value was about $3 billion. Twilio shares are up about 146% since then, as Twilio has proven a strong performer on the public markets.
This could enable Twilio to expand beyond pure core communications capabilities and it could come at the cost of around $5 billion for the two companies, a good deal for what could turn out to be a substantial business as more and more companies look for ways to understand and communicate with their customers in more relevant ways across multiple channels.
Twilio uses Amazon Web Services to host telephony infrastructure and provide connectivity between HTTP and the public switched telephone network (PSTN) through its APIs. Twilio follows a set of architectural design principles to protect against unexpected outages and received praise for staying online during the widespread Amazon Web Services outage in April 2011.
Twilio supports the development of open-source software and regularly makes contributions to the open-source community. In June 2010 Twilio launched OpenVBX, an open-source product that lets business users configure phone numbers to receive and route phone calls.
One month later, Twilio engineer Kyle Conroy released Stashboard, an open-source status dashboard written in the Python programming language that any API or software service can use to display whether their service is functioning properly.[30] Twilio also sponsors Localtunnel, created by now ex-Twilio engineer Jeff Lindsay, which enables software developers to expose their local development environment to the public Internet from behind a NAT.
Twilio’s competitors are SignalWire, CLX (Sinch, Symsoft, MBlox), Soprano Design, Infobip, Vonage (Nexmo), Plivo, Clickatell, and BICS (TeleSign).
