Acquisition strengthens Twilio’s messaging business by offering another affordable, trusted channel option

Direct carrier connectivity ensures toll-free remains a trusted, high-engagement channel for businesses looking to connect with customers via messaging

Combined companies to explore expansion opportunities for toll-free messaging channel

Twilio, the leading cloud communications platform, today 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. This transaction is valued at approximately $850 million in an approximately equal blend of cash and stock.

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“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”

“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,” said Simon Khalaf, SVP and general manager of the Twilio Communications Platform. “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.”

Zipwhip will operate as part of Twilio’s Communications Platform Unit with John Lauer, current CEO of Zipwhip, reporting to Simon Khalaf, as the two companies finalize their integration roadmap.

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“Customers have made it clear that messaging is a preferred channel for communicating with brands,” said John Lauer, CEO and co-founder of Zipwhip. “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. Together, this acquisition will provide 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

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC served as exclusive financial advisor and Cooley LLP served as legal counsel to Zipwhip. Fenwick & West LLP served as legal counsel to Twilio.

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