- Earlier this month, Twilio announced that it would acquire the customer data analytics startup Segment for $3.2 billion.
- Twilio chief product officer Chee Chew says the company sees a major opportunity in providing small businesses with tools to serve their customers.
- Twilio's stock has tripled since the beginning of the year, and Chew says that growth is due to many businesses having to shift online during the coronavirus pandemic.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
An exec at communications firm Twilio said that the firm plans to acquire customer data analytics startup Segment for $3.2 billion to help it target smaller companies and help them engage better with customers.
Twilio builds a platform to help customers build apps that can make phone calls or send messages. For example, Uber and Lyft use Twilio to allow drivers and passengers to call or text each other from within the app. Segment, meanwhile, provides tools that allow companies to analyze how to better communicate with and retain customers.
"It's all about that data," Twilio chief product officer Chee Chew told Business Insider. "We believe that by combining communications data and the communications channel we have with the power of customer data that Segment has, we can help businesses do a much better job deepening their relationship with their consumers."
With Segment, Twilio sees a major opportunity in helping small companies, Chew says.
The largest companies have already built their own tools to analyze customer data, but Twilio and Segment can make it easy for smaller customers to have those same capabilities as well, he said, allowing them to analyze their customer history and how they've interacted with those customers.
"Today, the biggest company with the largest fleets of engineers and the ability to invest in really activating their data have a huge advantage," Chew said. "The opportunity for us is how do we provide that power to every company so if you are a small company and you don't have a fleet of data engineers and machine learning engineers, how can you give the benefit of that knowledge?"
How Twilio has grown through the coronavirus pandemic
Twilio has grown massively through the pandemic. Its stock price has tripled since the beginning of the year, swelling the firm's market cap to $44 billion, as more companies have needed to use its tools to pivot their businesses to digital and serve their customers better online.
"Our customers who want to take advantage of change and accelerate have really doubled down on building," Chew said. "This time period has certainly been strange and caused a bunch of changes but what it's done has actually accelerated the future."
Chew doesn't expect these changes to be temporary.
"The shift of e-commerce, the importance of authentication and account security, all these things are long term shifts, and I think this period has just accelerated our move towards that," Chew said. "I think that acceleration will continue not only for this period, but also thereafter."
Once the acquisition closes, Chew says the first step will be to better understand Segment's customers and figure out how Twilio can work with them. Segment counts giant firms like Instacart, Levi's, Google, Atlassian, and Glossier among its clients.
"There are assets that we know we don't have and we're eager to learn," Chew said. "My approach about that is to really listen and learn and to not hold too many preconceived notions. There's a wealth of opportunity for us to build together and really activate that data for customers."
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