To meet the rising demand for cloud technology during the pandemic, Twilio is acquiring customer data start-up Segment in a stock deal valued at about $3.2 billion. Both companies are based in San Francisco and Segment will become part of the Twillio. The transaction is expected to close during the fourth quarter of Twilio’s fiscal 2020, ending December 31, 2020.
To tear down data silos
Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio, published a post on Twilio’s blog about the acquisition. According to Lawson, data silos destroy customer relationships by causing awful customer service and irrelevant and annoying marketing experiences. The main reason for this acquisition is to tear down these data silos, to help companies and their developers.
“Combined Twilio and Segment means Twilio can help any business and any developer makes 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” Lawson wrote.
Peter Reinhardt, Segment’s co-founder and CEO, said,
“Together, Twilio and Segment have an incredible opportunity to build the customer engagement platform of the future. We created Segment to help businesses set themselves apart in the digital age and deliver rich, connected customer experiences built on high-quality data. By joining forces and applying our customer data platform to Twilio’s engagement cloud, we’ll be able to make the entire customer experience seamless from end-to-end.”