Twilio acquires CRM startup Segment for £2.45 billion

Twilio has announced it's buying customer relationship management (CRM) startup Segment for $3.2 billion (£2.45 billion) in an all-stock deal. 

This deal marks Twilio's eighth acquisition since it was founded in 2008 and it's largest to date, surpassing its $2 billion takeover of SendGrid back in 2018. 

Twilio, which currently has a market cap of $43.83 billion, said the deal will enable it to leverage Segment's technology in order to equip businesses with "single, unified view that helps companies better understand their customers in order to engage more effectively."

Segment, which boasts big-name customers including VMware, Trivago and IBM, provides a set of APIs to pull together customer data from a variety of sources, including CRM tools, customer service applications, and websites. 

“Data silos destroy great customer experiences,” said Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio. “Segment lets developers and companies break down those silos and build a complete picture of their customer.

"Combined with Twilio's Customer Engagement Platform, we can create more personalized, timely and impactful engagement across customer service, marketing, analytics, product and sales. We are thrilled to welcome Segment to the Twilio team.”

The company also boasted that the deal will accelerate Twilio’s growth with a combined total addressable market of $79 billion, bringing it one step closer to achieving its vision of becoming "the world’s leading customer engagement platform trusted by developers and companies globally."

When the deal closes, Segment will become a business division within Twilio, with the company's co-founder and CEO Peter Reinhardt reporting to Lawson.

“Together, Twilio and Segment have an incredible opportunity to build the customer engagement platform of the future,” said Reinhardt, Segment’s co-founder and CEO.

“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.”

The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2020, Twilio said, adding that the boards of both companies have approved the merger.