Twilio, the leading cloud communications platform, announced the successful completion of its previously announced acquisition of Zipwhip, a trusted partner to carriers and a leading provider of toll-free messaging in the United States. The acquisition is valued at approximately $850 million.
Simon Khalaf, SVP and general manager of the Twilio Communications Platform, said:
“Today’s digital economy has every business evaluating the best ways to interact with their customers. Across every industry, Twilio sees messaging as an increasingly popular, trusted, and effective way to engage.”
“We’re very excited to make Zipwhip a part of the Twilio team and to leverage our combined messaging expertise across all channels to offer businesses of all sizes the most robust suite of messaging offerings.”
Going forward, Zipwhip will operate as part of Twilio’s Communications Platform Unit with John Lauer, current CEO of Zipwhip, reporting to Simon Khalaf.
John Lauer, CEO and co-founder of Zipwhip, said: “Customers have made it clear that messaging is a preferred channel for communicating with brands.”
“It is more essential than ever that businesses can reach their end customers on the right channel, at the right time, with the right message, and the combination of Twilio and Zipwhip creates an enormous opportunity to expand the options we can provide to businesses and elevate their overall experience.”
Twilio’s vision is to build the world’s leading customer engagement platform. This acquisition will offer developers and businesses:
- Another affordable, trusted, high-quality engagement option via messaging-enabled toll-free numbers
- A messaging channel that is easy to adopt and flexible enough to meet varying business requirements; toll-free is the most flexible number type and has low-friction onboarding
- Improved opportunity to expand the toll-free channel across both voice and text
- Direct connections to carriers which reduces carrier complexity, including onboarding, gateway, registry and spam detection, and remediation for all of the major U.S. carriers, ensuring routes have high quality traffic.
