Should Twilio Buy Klaviyo
Startup CMO on the data models underpinning CRMs
The real prize here was not email sending, it was control of the customer record that decides who gets messaged, when, and based on what behavior. Twilio already owned delivery through SendGrid and the data pipe through Segment, but Klaviyo was strong because it bundled those layers into one marketer friendly system for ecommerce teams, making the workflow simpler and the data harder to dislodge.
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Twilio had a clear strategic gap. Segment routed customer events between tools, and SendGrid handled email delivery, but the higher value software is the layer where a marketer builds audiences, edits customer profiles, and launches journeys. That is exactly where Klaviyo lived.
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Klaviyo was especially attractive because it made sophisticated customer data usable by non technical ecommerce marketers. Instead of relying on engineers to wire custom events forever, a brand team could upload lists, merge profiles, segment shoppers by behavior, and send email and SMS from one place.
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A deal at roughly $10B would have been expensive, but not irrational in context. Klaviyo was valued at $9.5B in May 2021, then reached an estimated $903M of revenue in 2024 and about $10.7B valuation, showing how large the asset became as ecommerce messaging consolidated around first party data.
The direction of travel is toward full stack customer engagement platforms that own profile data, orchestration, and delivery together. That favors companies like Klaviyo that turn raw event streams into an everyday tool for marketers, and it pushes infrastructure players like Twilio to move up the stack or risk becoming the plumbing underneath someone else’s application layer.