Twilio Acquires Ytica: Accelerates Twilio Flex Roadmap

Twilio Inc. (NYSE: TWLO), the leading cloud communications platform, today announced it has acquired Ytica (the “Acquisition”). A long time Twilio partner, Ytica provides highly customizable contact center reporting, speech analytics and workforce optimization (WFO) software to enhance agent performance in the contact center and provides businesses a unified view of the way they engage with their customers. Ytica’s technology will now be available as a part of Twilio Flex, Twilio’s fully programmable application platform for the contact center, and is also expected to be offered as a standalone product to other contact center SaaS vendors.

“In working with Ytica over the past several years, it became clear they have both the most robust cloud architecture in the WFO space as well as the most similar perspective as Twilio on the value of customization for enterprise software,” said Al Cook, general manager of Twilio Flex. “We’ve worked with many happy joint customers and knew that Ytica and Flex together could offer an enterprise-grade solution that is built for scale and far eclipses any other contact center solution currently in the market. We’re thrilled to bring Ytica aboard team Twilio.”

With Ytica, Twilio Flex will offer easy to use, pre-integrated WFO as a core capability, giving supervisors the tools required to provide real-time feedback to their contact center agents. Workforce optimization is critical to every company’s customer experience and, when executed effectively, can be a differentiator for savvy companies. By providing key insights into a business’ customer interactions, WFO has the potential to inform strategy for every function of the organization.

“Just as Twilio is a cloud 2.0 (maybe even 3.0?) approach to cloud contact center, Ytica was built starting with a clean sheet of paper by quality management experts to live in the world of microservices and the public cloud,” observes Sheila McGee-Smith, president & principal analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics. “Initially a great choice as a partner for Flex, Ytica as an integral part of Twilio brings not only next-gen WFO but a team with 20 years of contact center expertise.”

"The Ytica team has been at the forefront of WFO for the last 20 years,” said Šimon Vostrý, CEO and co-founder of Ytica. “We started Ytica to give contact centers complete visibility into their data, something unachievable with prior solutions, allowing managers to make informed and actionable decisions. Our philosophy on the future of contact centers and the architecture to get there aligns perfectly with Flex."

Twilio is also announcing the addition of a new office in Prague, the home of the Ytica team, and Twilio’s 17th location globally. Twilio’s additional office locations include San Francisco, Mountain View, New York, Atlanta, Bogota, London, Berlin, Dublin, Madrid, Tallinn, Melbourne, Munich, Malmo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Twilio is not updating its guidance for the full year ending Dec. 31, 2018, which it provided on Aug. 6, 2018. The proposed acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on Twilio's results of operations or financial condition for the full year ending Dec. 31, 2018.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements, including, among other things, about the expected benefits Twilio will be able to derive from the Acquisition and the joint product offered by Twilio and Ytica. The words such as “will,” “expected,” “could,” and similar phrases that denote future expectations or intent are intended to identify forward-looking statements. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events.

The outcome of the events described in these forward-looking statements is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause Twilio’s actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements, including, among other things: adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; changes in the market for communications; Twilio’s ability to adapt its products to meet evolving market and customer demands and rapid technological change; Twilio’s ability to generate sufficient revenues to achieve or sustain profitability; Twilio’s ability to retain customers and attract new customers; Twilio’s limited operating history, which makes it difficult to evaluate its prospects and future operating results; Twilio’s ability to effectively manage its growth; and Twilio’s ability to compete effectively in an intensely competitive market.

The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are also subject to additional risks, uncertainties, and factors, including those more fully described in Twilio’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2018. Further information on potential risks that could affect actual results will be included in the subsequent periodic and current reports and other filings that Twilio makes with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time.

Source: Twilio Inc.