Twilio’s $3.2B acquisition of Segment makes a lot of sense

The communications API firm Twilio has been en fuego, with its stock up nearly 3x over the past 12 months.

On Monday, the firm used $3.2B of that sweet sweet $TWLO stock to buy Segment, a customer data firm.

Building from a strong base

Founded in 2008, Twilio created a suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allowed any company to easily add text and voice services with a few lines of code.

As noted by Techcrunch, Twilio has not been shy to use acquisitions to expand its offering: It acquired email delivery provider SendGrid in 2018 for $2B and almost acquired chatbot startup Intercom in 2015.

Twilio has 200k+ active user accounts

With Segment in the mix — it can cross-sell data management and analytics services to these customers.

The acquisition itself is likely to be a smooth process, per Techcrunch:

• Both firms are API-oriented with strong existing integrations
• A number of ex-Twilio folk (which are unfortunately called “Xwillions”) are on the Segment team, including the CFO and CSO

The market was happy with the deal: $TWLO was up a sweet sweet 7%+ yesterday.