Will Twilio and ValueFirst meet rising customer expectations in the Indian Market?
On March 17th, 2021, San-Francisco based cloud communications firm, Twilio, declared its 8th acquisition.
India’s leading communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) player, headquartered in Gurugram, Valuefirst, is now a Twilio company.
Prior to its own acquisition, ValueFirst bought several companies and recorded net sales and profits of Rs 469 crore and Rs 13.4 crore, respectively, for the 2018-19 financial year, as per VCCEdge.
One of the earliest investors of the company, NEA, a global venture capital firm, holds a 31.89% stake in ValueFirst.
Twilio began its operations in India last year and hence on its acquisition with VFirst, the Senior Vice President (SVP) of Strategic Business Development for Twilio, Doug Garland said,
“ValueFirst’s entrepreneurial spirit and people-focused mentality remind us so much of our own values”.
He further added,
“Together, we are excited to accelerate our position in an important market and turbocharge our combined success.”
Twilio was recognized as the worldwide leader in the IDC MarketScape for Cloud Communications Platform-as-a-Service (“CPaaS”) in 2019.
Twilio’s mission is to fuel the future of communications while ValueFirst aims to connect businesses with consumers over telecom and the internet.
Since its inception in 2003, Valuefirst has succeeded in enabling circa billion interactions every month and has processed over 42 billion SMS messages in the last fiscal year.
With twenty-six offices across sixteen countries and counting, Twilio strives to make communications a part of every software developer’s toolkit to improve the human experience.
The financial status of the acquisition deal is not yet revealed by the companies.
The fact that customer expectations in India are on rising with increasing market share made Twilio enter the Indian market and expand its services among startups in India.
According to experts, the domains that can be the main areas of investment in the CPaaS industry include Machine Learning, Video, and Diagnostic, the reason being the renewed focus on IP-based communications.
With reduced face-to-face and in-person interaction across various IT industries and other companies due to covid outbreak led to increased demand in the CPaaS industry for enterprise engagement.
Jonathan Bean from Sinch reveals that only 20% of the global enterprises leveraged API-enabled CPaaS offerings to improve their digital transformation in 2020.
The number is expected to rise by 90% by 2023, as pointed out by Chief Marketing Officer of Sinch, Jonathan Bean, referring to Gartner forecasts.
Hence, the biggest trend in 2021 as stated by him is, “The exponential growth of CPaaS”.
With extraordinary events that happened last year, customer expectations have drastically changed due to the rise of non-communication channels which led CPaaS users to increase their revenue and conversions.
Back in 2019, experts predicted the rise of IoT and AI being the key driving forces for the sector. Twilio is the earliest CPaaS vendor to heavily invest in it.
Is it worth it?
We can wait this year to end and see what areas of investment came to its fruition with this acquisition.
