Twilio acquires messaging provider Beepsend to boost its SMS delivery network

As Twilio ($TWLO) reported its fourth quarter earnings on Tuesday, the company also revealed in its filing that it has acquired another company, picking up the messaging provider Beepsend. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Twilio plans to leverage the technology to build out its “Super Network,” a system that powers SMS delivery around the world.

Beepsend will continue to operate as usual, offering customers its portfolio of products. However, now that the deal has closed, it will be able to provide access to Twilio’s entire platform, including voice, messaging, and video services. All 40 employees will be joining Twilio.

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While the price was not disclosed, Twilio chief financial officer Lee Kirkpatrick said that Beepsend was running in the “high 6 figures”  and was close to break even. In terms of its revenue, the startup will contribute $1.5 million to Twilio’s revenue in the first quarter post-close and $10 million in 2017 as a whole.

Founded in 2006 in Sweden, Beepsend is an application-to-person messaging provider, allowing businesses to communicate with customers using things like SMS, over-the-top-messaging, number lookup, payment processing, and more. Its capabilities in message traffic segmentation, route monitoring, and analysis will be of interest to Twilio, especially based on the company’s recent push around the enterprise, SMS, and bots.

In September, Twilio began moving beyond just independent developers and startups and going after the enterprise. It launched a plan tailored towards I.T. departments and chief information officers that brought the flexibility of the cloud communication platform but provided the advanced security, access management, and regulatory controls highly protective companies desire.

And Twilio is about more than just phone calls. It has placed a lot of resources around SMS, including delivery. It has introduced new APIs that notifies developers of any message deliverability issues, synchronizes app data between devices and users, and also unifies SMS, app, and messenger push notifications. And let’s not forget that Twilio has extended its partnership with Amazon Web Services to facilitate delivery of SMS messages through the Amazon Simple Notification Services.

With all of these tools and large clients leveraging them, the capabilities of Beepsend seem to be a good fit for the Twilio community.

“As the uses of Twilio’s platform have continued to expand, we continue to optimize our Super Network to better serve our global customer base,” a Twilio spokesperson told VentureBeat. “The acquisition of Beepsend will accelerate our product roadmap for the Super Network and allow us to further extend our coverage and delivery options for customers.  As we look to extend our lead globally, Beepsend was a natural addition to add to the capabilities of our Super Network.”

This is not the only acquisition by Twilio since going public. In September, the company purchased the WebRTC media server technology from Kurento.