Twilio Acquires Segment, the Market-leading Customer Data Platform

Twilio Acquires Segment, the Market-leading Customer Data Platform

Understanding your customers is critical to a successful customer engagement strategy, but information about customers – what they bought, when they needed help, how they use your apps and websites, and more – is probably siloed across dozens of software systems inside your company. These data silos frustrate developers and companies as they try to build a single view of their customer so they can engage in a meaningful, relevant way.

These data silos are the enemies. They destroy customer relationships by driving awful service experiences and irrelevant marketing messaging. I faced this challenge at each of the four companies I founded, and, as a software developer, I constantly battled to wrangle data in a way that would allow us to better serve our customers.

Segment is the solution. Together, Segment and Twilio will tear down data silos, helping companies and their developers build great customer experiences.

Accelerating our customer engagement vision

Our team at Twilio spent the last 10+ years building the leading cloud communication platform. However, our vision is about more than communication: it's about end-to-end customer engagement, ultimately providing businesses with the holy grail – a single view of the customer journey.

Segment provides the data platform to add intelligence to Twilio’s digital engagement channels, which currently power 1 trillion interactions per year. By applying a data-driven approach typically used in marketing and functional areas like analytics, product, and customer service, Twilio will improve the end-to-end customer experience at every touchpoint.

As the leading customer data platform, Segment enables developers to unify customer data from every customer touchpoint, and empowers marketing, sales, and customer service leaders with the insights they need to design and build relevant, data-driven customer engagement. A combined Twilio and Segment means Twilio can help any business make their customer engagement across every channel more personalized, timely, and impactful.

Over time, the addition of Segment will allow Twilio to integrate data intelligence into Twilio Flex and every one of our offerings to provide highly-personalized customer touchpoints.

Shared mission, vision, and values

Segment and Twilio have much in common, including a similar vision, model, and values. Our shared vision is to drive meaningful customer engagement through intuitive technology across every channel. Our model empowers developers through a low friction go-to-market model that’s strategic to the enterprise. And, as always, developers are where it all starts – they’re a core part of our collective DNA – as developers are the builders who create the next generation of customer engagement.

Like me, Segment’s CEO, Peter Reinhardt, is a lifelong developer who became CEO. We share a mutual love and respect for developers, and have made developers a central focus of both Twilio’s and Segment’s culture and products. Peter’s thoughtful approach to building powerful developer tools will bring enormous value to Twilio’s executive team.

Please join me in welcoming our incredible Segment colleagues to the Twilio team. Welcome to Day One of the new standard for customer experience.

Now more than ever, we can't wait to see what you build.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains forward-looking statements regarding the anticipated benefits of the transaction. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements, such as any failure to fully realize the anticipated benefits of the acquisition of Segment; any failure to achieve expected synergies and efficiencies of operations as a result of the acquisition; the ability of Twilio to successfully integrate Segment’s technology, products, personnel and operations; any failure to timely develop and achieve market acceptance of the combined Twilio and Segment platforms; the loss of any Segment customers; and Twilio’s ability to retain and motivate key employees of Segment.

Additional risks and uncertainties are detailed in the reports that Twilio files with the SEC, including its Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019, and its Form 10-Qs. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on Twilio's website and are available from Twilio without charge.