Twilio Completes Acquisition of Segment

Twilio, the leading cloud communications platform announced the successful completion of its previously announced acquisition of Segment, the market-leading customer data platform. This transaction is valued at approximately $3.2 billion in Twilio Class A common stock, on a fully diluted and cash-free, debt-free basis.

“Nearly every company is focused on acquiring, retaining, and growing their customer relationships through digital engagement,” said Jeff Lawson, co-founder, and CEO of Twilio. “However, the biggest impediment to great digital engagement are the data silos that prevent companies from truly understanding their customers. With the addition of Segment, Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform now enables companies to both understand their customer, and engage with them digitally — the combination is key to building great digital experiences.”

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Segment will become a division of Twilio and will continue to be led by Segment CEO Peter Reinhardt, reporting to Lawson.

“Exceptional customer engagement requires not only high-quality data, but the infrastructure to activate those insights across every channel and customer interaction,” said Peter Reinhardt, co-founder, and CEO of Segment. “By bringing Twilio and Segment together, we will help businesses build a foundation of actionable insights critical to engaging with customers based on their needs and preferences to deliver a positive, seamless, and effective customer experience.”

Together, this acquisition will provide developers and companies:

• Unparalleled insight into the way customers interact across channels to create a single, unified view of the customer journey.
• The ability to break down data silos to help businesses make their customer engagement more personalized, timely, and impactful across channels.
• Access to the world’s leading cloud communications platform to more effectively manage customer communications including SMS, Messaging, Voice, Video, Email, Internet of Things (IoT), and more.
• A flexible API that allows developers to connect sources of customer data, such as web or mobile apps, with analytics tools, without having to write new code.
• A steady supply of quality, high velocity first-party data that easily integrates into existing systems.
• A single platform with views for the marketer, the contact center agent, the product teams, and the developers that reveal data-driven insights to serve their individual needs.

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“Customer engagement doesn’t begin or end at the arbitrary lines between internal departments,” said Nicole France, Vice President, and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. “Companies that recognize the central role of customer experience to their success are striving to unify customer engagement regardless of communication channel or the parts of the organization involved. They need better platforms to help them do so. That’s why the combination of Twilio and Segment holds so much promise. The two companies have complementary capabilities and comparable technical depth to support personalized, tailored customer experiences. While many customer data platforms primarily serve marketers, a Twilio-Segment platform that begins with a customer service perspective and incorporates both data and communications has the potential to unify capabilities far beyond marketing.”

​“Twilio’s acquisition of Segment will help customers better address the increasingly digital-first nature of customer engagement, and help deliver digital journey information to agents when live interactions are required,” said Sheila McGee-Smith, President & Principal Analyst, McGee-Smith Analytics. “This is especially important for B2C customers who need a single view of their customer to make customer engagement across every channel more personalized, timely, and impactful.”

Twilio intends to provide financial updates on its fourth quarter earnings call. Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC served as exclusive financial advisor to Twilio and Cooley LLP as legal advisor. Qatalyst Partners served as exclusive financial advisor to Segment and Goodwin Procter LLP as legal advisor.