$45.5 billion cloud communications company Twilio is reportedly getting ready to acquire data startup Segment for $3.2 billion

Jeff Lawson, co-founder and CEO of Twilio, launched his business during the recession.

(Photo by Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

• Cloud communications company Twilio is set to acquire data startup Segment for $3.2 billion, sources tell Forbes, though a deal is not yet final.
• Twilio has emerged as a winner in the pandemic economy, with its stock price just about tripling since the beginning of the year. The company now commands a market cap of over $45 billion.
• Segment was last valued at $1.5 billion in an April 2019 funding round, and counts Accel, Y Combinator, and Alphabet's GV (formerly Google Ventures) among its investors.
• Segment laid off 10% of its staff in May, in anticipation of a tougher IT spending environment amid the pandemic. However, the company indicated in September that it now has over 20,000 customers — up from 19,000 at the time of the layoffs. 
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$45.5 billion cloud communications company Twilio is acquiring data analytics startup Segment for $3.2 billion, two sources told Forbes, although the deal is not yet finalized.

This would be Twilio's largest acquisition to date: In 2018, the company acquired email marketing platform SendGrid for $2 billion, in what had been its biggest deal up to that point. A Twilio spokesperson told Forbes that it does not comment "on any rumors or speculation." Twilio and Segment did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider at the time of publication.

Twilio has emerged as a winner in the pandemic economy, with its stock price just about tripling since the beginning of the year. The company's technology allows developers to build software that can make and receive phone calls and send text messages, and counts Twitter, Uber, and Amazon's Twitch as customers. The company has seen demand skyrocket as companies in all sectors modernize their apps and online services to keep pace with the demands of the coronavirus pandemic.

Segment, for its part, was last valued at $1.5 billion in an April 2019 funding round, with investors including Y Combinator, Kleiner Perkins, Accel, and Alphabet's GV (formerly Google Ventures). All told, it's raised about $284 million in venture capital funding, and counts beauty brand Glossier and Levi's as clients of its customer data analysis tools. The company competes with Oracle and Salesforce in the customer data market. 

However, Segment ran into some turbulence early on in the pandemic: It laid off 10% of its staff in May, in anticipation of a tougher IT spending environment. 

"Recent events have shown us that while there are many things outside of our control, what we can control is how we come together to support one another as we move ahead," the company said in a statement to Business Insider at the time. "Our mission and vision remain unchanged, and never more relevant: to enable customer-focused growth with good data."

However, as Forbes notes, Segment may also emerge as a winner when all is said and done. In May, Segment told Business Insider that it had 19,000 customers. In September, the company said that figure was up to 20,000.

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