The acquisition will provides businesses a unified customer view to better understand customers and engage more effectively.
Twilio announced on Monday that they plan to acquire Segment, which they hailed as the “market-leading customer data platform.”
Twilio plans to acquire Segment for approximately $3.2 billion in its common stock. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Solving the “silo” problem together
Twilio provides a suite of cloud services to help companies develop communications features for their applications. For example, Twilio services can help build a chat function into a mobile app. The company’s platform can also manage email marketing campaigns and other B2C comms functions.
Jeff Lawson, Twilio’s Founder, Chairman and CEO, explained why the company was acquiring Segment in a blog post. “Understanding customers is critical to a successful customer engagement strategy,” he explained. The challenge, says Lawson, is that customer data is often “siloed” across various applications.
“These data silos are the enemy,” Lawson writes. “They destroy customer relationships by causing awful customer service and irrelevant and annoying marketing experiences.”
Lawson sees Segment as the best way to solve the challenge posed by these silos. “Segment is the answer to this problem,” he declares. “Together, Segment and Twilio will tear down these data silos, helping companies and their developers build great customer experiences.”
Peter Reinhardt, Segment’s co-founder and CEO, echoed Lawson’s sentiments. “We created Segment to help businesses set themselves apart in the digital age,” he said.
“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,” he added.
How Segment adds value to Twilio’s offering
The transaction will accelerate Twilio’s growth with a combined total addressable market of $79 billion. This will bring Twilio “one step closer to achieving the company’s vision of becoming the world’s leading customer engagement platform trusted by developers and companies globally.”
“Segment provides the data platform to add intelligence to Twilio’s digital engagement channels that currently power 1 trillion interactions per year,” said Lawson.
“A combined Twilio and Segment means Twilio can help any business make their customer engagement across every channel more personalized, timely and impactful.”
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