On May 17, 2021, Twilio announced the acquisition of Zipwhip in a cash and stock deal valued at around USD 850 million. The acquired company deals in toll-free messaging services in the US, and the native Twilio has plans to improve its existing messaging products by using its technology.
“Messaging is becoming a preferred way for consumers to engage with brands, therefore it’s critical to provide multiple messaging options,” said Simon Khalaf, SVP and General Manager of the Twilio Communications Platform. “By bringing together the world’s leading cloud communications platform and a trusted partner in the messaging ecosystem, we have the ability to deliver more secure, high-quality toll-free traffic at scale.”
How Zipwhip works?
It is a business texting platform that allows organizations to reach their customers through SMS via their existing toll-free phone numbers. It provides the customization APIs, the suite of integration or software products to other organizations to enable their toll-free numbers and reach the customers.
More services by Zipwhip are onboarding, gateway, spam detection, registry, and remediation for all major US carriers. The company has over 30,000 customers globally, including resellers, and has witnessed more than 400% growth in the last three years.
About Twilio
It offers communication services and its related roadmap to make the company more of a customer engagement platform. In the third-quarter results, the company acquired Segment, a customer data platform (CDP) company, in a deal worth USD 3.2 million.
In a recent announcement, the company revealed that it would split the R and amp;D (research and amp; development) into three units: Twilio Communications Platform, Twilio Core Platform, and Twilio Data Platform, each reporting to CEO Jeff Lawson.