Twilio Stock

Twilio Inc. (Twilio) provides software and communications solutions.

The company enables businesses of all sizes and across numerous industries to revolutionize how they engage with their customers. Its leading customer engagement platform (‘CEP’) comprises a suite of flexible software and communications solutions that allow businesses to deliver seamless, trusted and engaging customer experiences at scale. The value proposition of its offerings has become stronger and its products have become more strategic to the company’s customers as more and more businesses have prioritized building stronger, more personalized and more differentiated customer engagement experiences through digital channels.

The company’s CEP empowers businesses to create the tailored solutions needed to engage their customers at every step of the customer journey through real-time, relevant, personalized communications over the customers’ preferred communication channels. With the company’s platform, businesses can personalize every transaction with real-time data, build lasting loyalty, cut customer acquisition costs and increase customer lifetime value. The company’s customized software products are designed to address specific use cases, including its customer data platform, virtual contact centers, personalized yet scalable marketing campaigns, and advanced account security systems. The company’s leading communications solutions, including its application programming interfaces (‘APIs’), are highly customizable and enable developers to embed numerous forms of voice, messaging, and email interactions into their customer-facing applications. The company’s platform is designed to support all of the most important ways people communicate through technology and the company’s global infrastructure is capable of supporting virtually any business at scale.

The company’s platform, which uniquely combines its highly customizable communications APIs with leading customer data management capabilities, allows businesses to do exactly that, breaking down data silos and building a comprehensive single source for their customer data organized into unique profiles and easily accessible by all their business teams. Empowered with this information and the insights it enables, businesses using the company’s platform can provide robust, personalized and effective communications to their customers at every stage of their customer relationships.

As of December 31, 2022, the company had over 290,000 Active Customer Accounts that represent organizations big and small, old and young, across nearly every industry. The company’s growth to this scale has predominantly been organic as a result of its customers increasing their usage of its products, extending their usage of its products to new applications, or adopting new products that the company offers. The company has also fueled its growth through successful strategic acquisitions and integrations of businesses that complemented the company’s pre-existing products and allowed the company to expand its platform and to add new customer accounts. Acquisitions of note have included Segment, the leading customer data platform the company acquired in 2020, and Zipwhip, Inc., the leading toll-free messaging provider the company acquired in 2021.

As the company announced on February 13, 2023, moving forward the company will operate as two separate business units: Twilio Communications and Twilio Data & Applications. This strategic realignment will enable the company to better execute on the key priorities for each side of the company’s business—driving efficiencies for Twilio Communications and accelerating growth for Twilio Data & Applications—while accounting for each business unit’s unique economic, customer and product needs. These two business units can execute toward their respective financial goals with more focus and independence—but they are also highly complementary. The company’s Data & Applications business benefits from its underlying communications platform and its substantial active customer base. The company’s success in Data & Applications also drives more intelligence for its Communications products. Together, they address adjacent buyers and related problems that its customers have. With this strategic realignment, the company is well-positioned to achieve its long-term plan of creating the market-leading customer engagement platform.

Platform

The company’s platform provides developers tools to build, scale, and deploy real-time communications within software applications, while simultaneously offering technology that allows businesses to harness the power of first-party data to improve the experience of their customers. The data the company’s platform collects can inform every interaction across the customer journey to achieve more personalized, timely and impactful engagement. This in turn empowers businesses to build productive one-to-one relationships, at scale, through both easy-to-use APIs and extensible software products like Twilio Flex and Twilio Engage. The central pillars of the company’s customer engagement platform, consistent with the new business unit structure referenced above, are described below.

Communications

The company’s Communications solutions consist of highly customizable APIs and products that can be used individually or in combination to build rich contextual communications within applications. The company offers easy-to-use flexible building blocks for developers to build omnichannel engagements with customers worldwide. The company also provides advanced compliance management to support success within a changing ecosystem of regulations. The company’s Communications solutions include Programmable Messaging, Programmable Voice, Email, Account Security and more. The majority of the company’s communications products are offered on a usage basis. Email is offered on a subscription basis.

The company’s platform is connected to its ‘Super Network,’ a software layer that enables the company’s customers’ applications to communicate with devices globally. The Super Network interconnects communications networks and inbox services providers around the world and continually analyzes data to optimize the quality and cost of communications that flow through its platform. The Super Network also contains a set of APIs that gives the company’s customers access to additional foundational components offered through its platform, such as phone numbers and session initiation protocol (‘SIP’) trunking.

Core offerings of the company’s Communications business include:

Programmable Messaging: Twilio Programmable Messaging (MessagingX) is an API to send and receive SMS, MMS, Toll-Free SMS, High-Throughput Toll-Free SMS and over-the-top (‘OTT’) (e.g., WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger) messages globally. It uses intelligent sending features to ensure messages reliably reach end users wherever they are. The company’s customers use this API to address numerous use cases, including account notifications, marketing, account security and order confirmations, as well as two-way and conversational use cases, such as conversational sales support and customer care.

Programmable Voice: Twilio Programmable Voice allows developers to build solutions to make, manage and receive phone calls globally through a browser, an app, a phone or anywhere else one can take a call. The company’s voice software, which works over both the traditional public switched telephone network (‘PSTN’) and over Internet Protocol (‘VoIP’), allows developers to incorporate advanced voice functionality, such as text-to-speech, global conferencing, emergency calling, call recording, media streams, and others, as well as address use cases, such as contact centers, call tracking, analytics solutions, and anonymized communications.

Email: Twilio SendGrid Email API (‘Email API’) solves email delivery challenges at scale, enabling customers to build customized solutions and helpful shortcuts to streamline integration and optimize for inbox placement. The Email API allows businesses to integrate with multiple leading development frameworks and client libraries in multiple languages, as well as customize various links and domains. It also provides sender authentication, security, mobile support and many other tools. Businesses use the company’s email products for both marketing messages and transactional emails, including shipping notifications, friend requests, password resets and sign-up confirmations.

Account Security: Twilio Verify is a managed solution that effectively adds security at the point of new user activation and onwards, providing a seamless, consistent and secure login experience. Using the company’s two-factor authentication APIs, developers can add an extra layer of security to their applications with second-factor passwords sent to users via SMS, voice, email or push notifications.

Data & Applications

The company’s Data & Applications solutions enable businesses to create highly personalized experiences and campaigns across multiple channels using real-time customer data. They also allow businesses to break down data silos across their organizations and to leverage a single unified source of customer data for their various business teams.

The company’s Data & Applications products are primarily offered on a subscription basis. The company’s Communications products that are embedded into its Data & Applications products are charged separately on a usage basis.

Core offerings of the company’s Data & Applications business include:

Twilio Segment: Twilio Segment is a leading customer data platform (‘CDP’) that provides businesses with the tools to harness the power of first-party data by unifying information collected throughout each customer’s journey into a unique profile. Twilio Segment collects, contextualizes and unlocks the potential of first-party data across the customer engagement stack by collecting user data from interactions with websites, mobile apps, digital ads, and more; combining data from these different sources and systems to form a complete picture of each customer; creating from this a customer profile that can be accessed by every business team within the organization; and integrating customer data into subsequent interactions to drive personalization across channels.

In addition to creating unified profiles that drive personalized customer interactions, Twilio Segment includes privacy and security features that help businesses comply with privacy laws, including the General Data Protection Regulation (‘GDPR’) and the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (‘CCPA’).

Twilio Engage: Twilio Engage builds upon the unified profiles of Twilio Segment to enable marketers to create personalized campaigns and to manage, measure and scale them through a single platform. Such campaigns can include personalized messages delivered via native SMS, email, and/or custom channels. Through Twilio Engage, businesses can deepen their customer relationships and convert what might otherwise have been isolated interactions into continuous, long-term relationships.

Twilio Flex: Twilio Flex is a programmable virtual contact center built for the new world of tailored customer experiences and omnichannel communications. Twilio Flex is a fully programmable contact center platform that allows companies to deploy a broad array of customer engagement channels while providing the tools to easily create, change or extend any part of their custom solutions. With Twilio Flex, businesses can rapidly deploy tailored cloud contact centers to create an exact omnichannel contact center experience that addresses their specific business needs.

Marketing Campaigns: Marketing Campaigns is built on top of the company’s proven email infrastructure to help digital marketers build and send email campaigns at scale, faster than ever. With drag and drop editing, approachable automation and powerful contacts management, Marketing Campaigns help marketers attract and retain customers more efficiently. Marketing Campaigns include email design and templates, list management, dynamic content and email testing.

Strategy

The company is a leader in the customer engagement platform category. The company is concentrating its investments in the highest-impact product areas for the company’s future, and the company intends to pursue the following strategies: accelerating growth of the company’s Data & Applications business; continue driving simplification and efficiencies in the company’s Communications business; and driving operating leverage across the business.

Sales and Marketing

The company’s sales and marketing teams are focused on executing on the company’s top priorities to accelerate growth of the company’s Data & Applications business by accelerating customer acquisitions; and maintain profitability and market leadership position of the company’s Communications business by cross-selling communications and other products for account expansion. The company’s sales organization includes sales development, inside sales, field sales, specialty sales and sales engineering personnel.

As customers expand their usage of the company’s platform, the company expands its relationships with them to include business leaders within their organizations. The company supplements its self-service model with account executives and customer success managers when such engagement is needed to provide value to its self-serving customers. The company’s Email solution is offered on a subscription basis.

When potential customers do not have the available developer resources to build their own applications, the company refers them to either its technology partners who embed the company’s products in the solutions that they sell to other businesses (such as contact centers and marketing automation), its professional services team or outside consulting partners who provide consulting and development services for organizations that have limited software development expertise to build their software applications on its platform.

Customer Support

To make it easy to learn how to use the company’s products, the company provides all of its users with comprehensive documentation, how-to guides and tutorials. The company supplements and enhances these tools with the participation of the company’s engaged developer community. In addition, the company provides support options to address the individualized needs of its customers. All of the company’s customers get free support and system status notifications. The company’s customers can also engage with the broader Twilio community to resolve issues.

The company offers three paid tiers of support with increasing levels of availability and guaranteed response times. The company also offers professional services, which provide in-depth, hands-on, fee-based packages of advisory, software architecture, integration and coding services to existing and prospective customers and partners to optimize their use of the Twilio platform. For its Data & Applications products, offerings include services for implementing contact center solutions and customer data platform design. For the company’s Communications products, offerings include email implementation and deliverability, and configuration and integration of its communications channels.

Intellectual Property

As of December 31, 2022, in the United States, the company had 232 issued patents, which expire between 2029 and 2041. The company also had 36 issued patents in foreign jurisdictions, all of which were related to the company’s U.S. patents and patent applications. The company has also filed various applications in the United States and internationally to establish and protect the company’s rights to certain aspects of its intellectual property portfolio. In addition, as of December 31, 2022, the company had 58 registered trademarks in the United States and 512 registered trademarks in foreign jurisdictions.

History

Twilio Inc. was founded in 2008. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 2008.