Cloud communications company Twilio revealed plans to acquire a minority stake in Syniverse for up to US$750 million, part of a deal The Wall Street Journal tipped to pave the way for the software company to become publicly traded.
A statement announcing the deal appeared to confirm this possibility, explaining the companies would jointly “pursue additional potential financing transactions” including “a public market transaction or an additional equity investment”.
The deal is expected to close by the end of the year and includes a wholesale agreement putting Syniverse in charge of processing application-to-person messaging traffic between Twilio customers and mobile operators.
Twilio’s cloud-based communications platform delivers voice, text, video and email communications for 220,000 customers across the globe, while Syniverse is one of the telecom industry’s largest IP packet exchange providers.
Syniverse executive chairman, James Attwood stated the pairing would enable it to “accelerate our next phase of growth” through “access to Twilio’s extensive enterprise and API services expertise”.
Twilio chief product officer Chee Chew added Syniverse’s expertise navigating “the complexity of the interconnected telecommunications ecosystem” would allow it to offer “best-in-class” services as messaging increasingly becomes a preferred communication channel with consumers.
