TWILIO INC 10-K

Item 1. Business Overview We envision a world in which every digital interaction between businesses and their customers is amazing. By combining our leading communications capabilities, plus rich contextual data, plus generative and predictive artificial intelligence (“AI”), we enable businesses of all sizes to revolutionize how they engage with their customers by delivering seamless, trusted, and personalized customer experiences at scale. We offer communications application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that enable developers to embed numerous forms of messaging, voice, email, and video interactions into their customer-facing applications, as well as software products that target specific engagement needs, including our customer data platform, digital engagement centers, marketing campaigns, and user authentication and identity solutions. This combination of flexible APIs and software solutions helps businesses of all sizes and across numerous industries to benefit from smarter and more streamlined engagement at every step of the customer journey, including reduced customer acquisition costs, lasting loyalty, and increased customer value. Our platform, which combines our highly customizable communications APIs with customer data management capabilities and AI-powered predictions and recommendations, allows businesses to break down data silos and build a comprehensive single source for their customer data that is organized into unique profiles that are easily accessible by all their business teams. Empowered with this information and the insights it enables, businesses using our platform can provide robust, personalized, and effective communications to their customers at every stage of their customer relationships at scale. The value proposition of our offerings has become stronger and our products have become more strategic to our customers as businesses are increasingly prioritizing building more personalized and differentiated customer engagement experiences through digital channels. On January 1, 2025, we realigned our business unit structure into a functional support model under one organization. We believe that operating as one organization best positions us as we seek to deliver one trusted, smart and integrated platform that enables more personalized communications and engagements for customers. Despite realigning our organizational structure, we continue to have two reportable segments. Our Communications reportable segment consists of a variety of APIs and software solutions to optimize communications between our customers and their end users. Our key offerings in our Communications reportable segment include Messaging, Voice, Email (which includes Marketing Campaigns), Flex, and User Authentication and Identity. Our Segment reportable segment consists of software products that enable businesses to leverage their contextual data to create unique customer profiles and achieve more effective customer engagement. Our key offering in our Segment reportable segment is our Segment product. We have experienced substantial growth in our business since inception, and as of December 31, 2024, we had over 325,000 Active Customer Accounts representing organizations from small and medium-sized businesses to large enterprises across a broad range of industries. Our growth has predominantly been organic as a result of new customer acquisition, as well as customers increasing their usage of our products, extending their usage of our products to new applications, or adopting new products that we offer. We have also fueled our growth through strategic acquisitions and integrations of businesses that complemented our pre-existing products and allowed us to expand our platform and to add new customer accounts. Our Platform We aim to deliver the leading customer engagement platform that intelligently orchestrates customer engagement across the entire customer life cycle by combining our communications capabilities with rich contextual data and AI. Our trusted, simple, and smart platform provides developers with tools to build, scale, and deploy real-time communications within software applications, while simultaneously offering technology that allows businesses to harness the power of contextual data to develop more informed insights about their customers. The data that our platform securely collects, supported by our AI-powered predictions and recommendations, can inform interactions across the customer journey to achieve more personalized, timely, and impactful customer engagement. This in turn empowers businesses to build more productive and personalized one-to-one relationships, at scale, through both easy-to-use APIs and extensible software products. Trust in our platform is a top priority as we continue to innovate, and we prioritize trust through investments in system availability and security. 5 Table of Contents We offer highly customizable APIs and products to build rich contextual communications within applications, allowing developers to build orchestrated engagements with customers worldwide. We also offer solutions for user authentication and identity, and advanced compliance and regulatory management software to support success within a changing ecosystem of regulations. Additionally, our customer data platform enables businesses to collect, contextualize, and leverage first-party and real-time customer data to create highly personalized experiences and campaigns across multiple channels. It also allows businesses to break down data silos across their organizations and to leverage a single unified source of customer data for their various business teams. Our products can be used individually or in combination to enable more personalized, timely, and impactful communications and engagements across the customer journey. Our platform is connected to our Super Network (“Super Network”), a software layer that enables our customers’ applications to communicate with devices globally. The Super Network interconnects communications networks and inbox services providers around the world and continually analyzes billions of data points to optimize the quality and cost of communications that flow through our platform. The Super Network also contains a set of APIs that gives our customers access to additional foundational components offered through our platform, such as phone numbers and session initiation protocol trunking. Our key products include: • Messaging. Twilio Programmable Messaging and Conversations (“Messaging”) are APIs to send and receive SMS, MMS, RCS, and over-the-top (e.g., WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger) messages globally over a variety of sender types. Messaging uses intelligent sending features to ensure messages reliably reach end users wherever they are. Our customers use these APIs to address numerous use cases, including account notifications, marketing, mass alerts, and order confirmations, as well as multi-party and conversational use cases, such as conversational marketing, sales support, and customer care. • Voice. Twilio Programmable Voice (“Voice”) is an API that allows developers to build solutions to make, manage, and receive phone calls globally through a browser, application, phone, or other methods. Our voice software, which works over both the traditional public switched telephone network and over Internet Protocol (“VoIP”), allows developers to incorporate advanced voice functionality such as integrations with AI-based virtual agents, text-to-speech, global conferencing, emergency calling, call recording, and media streams, as well as address use cases such as contact centers, interactive voice response systems, call tracking, analytics solutions and anonymized communications. • Email. Twilio SendGrid Email (“Email”) is an API and no-code user interface that solves email delivery challenges at scale. Built on our proprietary mail transfer agent, Email enables customers to build customized solutions and optimize for inbox placement. Our Email API allows businesses to integrate with multiple leading development frameworks and client libraries in multiple languages as well as customize content. It also provides sender authentication, security, mailbox compliance, and delivery dashboards. Our Marketing Campaigns product, which features a no-code user interface and is built on top of our Email infrastructure, enables email campaign sending at scale. Marketing Campaigns includes email design and templates, list management, dynamic content and email testing. Businesses use our Email products for both marketing messages and transactional emails, including promotional offers, newsletters, shipping notifications, password resets, and sign-up confirmations. • Flex. Twilio Flex (“Flex”) is a digital engagement center for the entire customer journey—a sales tool for pre-purchase conversations, a cloud-based contact center, and an in-app digital concierge. Flex is built for the new world of tailored customer experiences and omnichannel communications, allowing businesses to deploy a broad array of personalized, data-driven customer engagement channels while providing the tools to easily create, change or extend any part of their custom solutions. With Flex, businesses can rapidly deploy a tailored cloud-based engagement center that addresses their specific needs. • User Authentication and Identity. Our User Authentication and Identity solutions enable registering, onboarding, and recognizing customers. Twilio Verify (“Verify”) is a managed solution for multi-channel user verification, which effectively adds security at the point of new user activation and onwards, providing a low-friction and secure login experience. Using Verify for two-factor authentication, businesses can add an extra layer of security to their applications with passwords sent to users via SMS, voice, email, or push notifications, as well as passkeys. Verify includes Fraud Guard, which is aimed at automatically blocking fraudulent messages resulting from artificially inflated traffic or SMS pumping. Additionally, Twilio Lookup API provides real-time mobile-based identity intelligence that can reduce fraud risks and improve message delivery. 6 Table of Contents • Segment. Twilio Segment is a leading customer data platform that provides businesses with the tools to harness the power of contextual data by unifying real-time information collected throughout each customer’s journey into a unique profile. Segment helps businesses create precise audiences, continuous experiences, and contextual personalization with a unified view of the customer, seamless journey orchestration, and easy-to-use AI based on data that can be trusted to save time and achieve results. The components of our customer data platform include: • Connections for integrating web and mobile app data with a single API, easily transforming and loading customer data into cloud data warehouses, activating data from the warehouse with Reverse ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), and customizing data pipelines. Segment Connections supports over 700 data sources and destinations out of the box. • Protocols to protect the integrity of data and user privacy and help businesses comply with various privacy laws, including the General Data Protection Regulation, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. • Unify for combining customer data from across every channel into trusted customer profiles, and syncing those profiles to the cloud data warehouse for enrichment and machine learning (“ML”) modeling. • Engage to deepen customer relationships by personalizing customer interactions on every channel, build dynamic audiences from complete, real-time, profiles and orchestrate cross-channel customer journeys. • AI capabilities to provide 1:1 interactions at scale, including the utilization of generative AI to create targeted audiences and launch personalized customer journeys using simple text prompts, and predictive AI to predict customer behavior, build targeted audiences and deliver more personalized campaigns. We generate revenue from our platform through a combination of usage-based and subscription-based fees. Revenue generated from Messaging, Voice, and User Authentication and Identity is primarily recognized on a usage basis. Revenue generated from Email (which includes Marketing Campaigns), Flex, and Segment is primarily recognized on a subscription basis. We experience seasonal trends due to increased consumer activity in the fourth quarter. Our Strategy Our strategy is rooted in simplifying our offerings to deliver a trusted, intuitive customer and end-consumer experience. By enhancing the capabilities we already have and building new ones, we plan to offer our customers a more powerful, cohesive platform that continues to set us apart in the market. Our goal is to offer one trusted, simple, and smart platform that enables more personalized, timely, and impactful communications and engagements across the customer journey. We are combining our leading communications capabilities, plus rich contextual data, plus the power of AI. This powerful combination positions us to unlock smarter and more personalized interactions for businesses. We are concentrating on the highest-impact product areas for our future, and we intend to pursue the following strategies: • One Trusted, Simple, and Smart Platform. We are harnessing Twilio’s foundational strengths in communication channel offerings, global scale, developer loyalty, and contextual data assets to deliver a more holistic, trusted, simple, and smart platform. Our investments in innovation now include vertical products along with the components and characteristics of a horizontal platform, including cross-channel orchestration capabilities. Our aim for our platform innovation is to help customers reduce friction and streamline how customers add communication channels, enabling more personalized interactions and deeper engagement with their end customers. • Winning in Customer Data. We are focused on Segment’s interoperability across the data ecosystem to support growth in our Segment business. We also continue to innovate with predictive and generative AI to help customers increase the value and impact of Segment in customer engagement. We believe we can improve engagement using insights from communications data and consumer insights to offer more proactive and personalized experiences, resulting in more effective marketing, sales, and customer support. • Leveraging AI. We believe AI and ML have the potential to increase the value and reach of our platform capabilities, and make every customer interaction more personalized and intelligent. We are continuing to invest in AI-enabled products and features for our customers, as well as internal applications to automate processes and help our business run more efficiently. 7 Table of Contents • Efficient Go-to-Market Execution. We are focused on improving profitability and growing our market share. To achieve this, we are focused on bolstering our independent software vendor (“ISV”) and other partner relationships, improving our self-service capabilities, cross-selling our products, and expanding internationally. • Driving Operating Leverage Across our Business. We are implementing several organizational initiatives targeted at simplifying, modernizing and improving the efficiency of our business processes, introducing automation and AI into our internal operations, enhancing our fiscal discipline on all levels, and enacting workforce planning initiatives. Competition The markets for our products are rapidly evolving and are increasingly competitive. Our competitors are primarily (i) communications platform-as-a-service (“CPaaS”) companies that offer communications products and applications, (ii) other software companies that compete with portions of our communications product line, (iii) regional network service providers that offer limited developer functionality on top of their own physical infrastructure, (iv) customer relationship management and customer experience vendors and (v) standalone customer data platform vendors. The principal competitive factors in these markets include completeness of offering, credibility with customers, ability to differentiate our products against competing offerings, global reach, ease of integration and programmability, product features, platform scalability, reliability, deliverability, security and performance, brand awareness and reputation, the strength of sales and marketing efforts, customer support, and the cost of deploying and using products. We believe that we compete favorably on the basis of the factors listed above and that none of our competitors currently compete directly with us across all of our product offerings. With the introduction of new products and services and new market entrants, we expect competition to intensify in the future. Research and Development Our research and development efforts are focused on building one holistic trusted, simple, and smart customer engagement platform while enhancing our existing products and developing new products and features. Our research and development organization is predominantly built around small development teams. Our small development teams foster greater agility, which enables us to develop new, innovative products and make rapid changes to our infrastructure that increase resiliency and operational efficiency. Our development teams designed and built much of our customer engagement platform and our core platforms stack. These teams continue to focus on the highest impact product areas for our future, which includes focusing on continued innovation in the face of rapid technological change and changing industry practices. We are continuing to invest in AI-powered capabilities, which we believe have the potential to enhance our offerings’ value to customers, as well as to automate processes and help our business run more efficiently. As of December 31, 2024, we had 2,581 employees in our research and development organization. Sales and Marketing Our sales and marketing teams work closely together to drive awareness and adoption of our platform. We leverage our brand, marketing programs, developer network, and conferences, such as SIGNAL, to expand our go-to-market motions. Our go-to-market model has three motions: self-service, sales-led, and partner-led. Developers, marketers, and other technical users are able to access our easy-to-configure APIs and tools along with our extensive self-service documentation and customer support team, to embed our products into their applications. These self-service customers can then provide their billing information to either make an upfront prepayment that is drawn down as they use our products, or subscribe to a plan, depending on the product they deploy. Our enterprise and commercial customers have access to our sales and solutions team to support their businesses across their customer journey. This is a direct sales motion and is supported by sales development, field marketing, and solution engineers. This model emphasizes value-based discovery, technical proof of concept, and building strong customer relationships. Our sales organization targets technical, marketing, and business leaders who are seeking to leverage software to drive superior customer engagement and competitive differentiation. Our sales and solutions teams also support our ISV partners, who leverage our APIs to build software and services that they can resell to their customers across a varying number of use cases and verticals. 8 Table of Contents When potential customers do not have the available developer resources or expertise to build our products into their own applications, we refer them to one of our partners to help deliver their solution. Depending on their use case and available resources, we may refer them to an ISV partner who offers the solution, a consulting partner or a systems integrator who provides consulting and development services to build their solution, or our professional services team who can provide expert guidance on achieving their solution. As of December 31, 2024, we had 2,294 employees in our sales and marketing organization. Customer Support and Services To make learning how to use our products straightforward, we provide all users with comprehensive documentation, how-to guides, and tutorials. These resources are further enriched by contributions from our active customer community. Additionally, we offer support options tailored to meet individual customer needs including both free and paid personalized plans. All customers receive free support through our chatbots, Help Center Assistant, and access to technical documentation. We also maintain a status page on our website that provides real-time updates on any known incidents, outages or degradation on our API platform and external carrier connections. Customers can also sign up to receive automatic updates and notifications without needing to contact customer support. Furthermore, customers can engage with the wider Twilio community for guidance and assistance in resolving API-related issues. For our Communications products, we generally offer three paid tiers of support with increasing levels of availability and guaranteed response times. Our highest tier plan, intended for our largest customers, includes a technical account manager, duty manager coverage, and quarterly status reviews. Similarly, our subscription products generally feature a base level of customer support plus premium, paid support options. Our support model is global, with coverage available 24x7. We currently derive an insignificant amount of revenue from fees for customer support. We also offer professional services which provide in-depth, hands-on, fee-based packages of advisory, software architecture, integration and coding services to existing and prospective customers and partners to optimize their use of the Twilio platform. For Flex and Segment, offerings include services for implementing digital engagement center solutions and customer data platform design. For our other Communications products, offerings include email implementation and deliverability, and configuration and integration of our communications channels. Intellectual Property We rely on a combination of patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret and other intellectual property laws in the United States and other jurisdictions, as well as license agreements, other contractual protections, and internal processes, procedures, and controls, to protect, establish, maintain, and enforce our intellectual property and other proprietary rights technology. We also rely on a number of registered trademarks, applications for trademarks and common law protections afforded to certain unregistered trademarks to protect our brand. As of December 31, 2024, in the United States, we have been issued 320 patents, which expire between 2029 and 2043. As of such date, we also had 40 issued patents in foreign jurisdictions, all of which are related to our U.S. patents and patent applications. We have also filed various applications for protection of certain aspects of our intellectual property in the United States and internationally. In addition, as of December 31, 2024, we had 54 registered trademarks in the United States and 569 registered trademarks in foreign jurisdictions. We currently, and will continue to, seek to protect our intellectual property and other proprietary rights by, among other things, implementing, maintaining, and enforcing a policy that requires our employees, independent contractors and certain suppliers involved in developing intellectual property for us or on our behalf to enter into agreements acknowledging that all work product or other forms of intellectual property generated, created, reduced to practice, conceived, or otherwise developed by them on our behalf are owned by us such that we can use the intellectual property they develop for our business purposes. 9 Table of Contents Regulatory We are subject to a number of U.S. federal, U.S. state and foreign laws and regulations that involve matters central to our business. These laws and regulations may involve privacy, data protection, data security, intellectual property, competition, telecommunications, broadband, VoIP, consumer protection, export controls, economic sanctions, anti-bribery, anti-corruption, anti-money laundering, taxation, or other subjects. Many of the laws and regulations to which we are subject are still evolving and we expect to become subject to additional laws and regulations in the future. The application and interpretation of these laws and regulations often are uncertain, particularly in the new and rapidly evolving industry in which we operate. Compliance with current and future laws and regulations, and changes in their enforcement and interpretation, may significantly increase our compliance costs and otherwise adversely affect our business and results of operations. For additional information about laws and regulations applicable to our business, see Part I, Item 1A, “Risk Factors-Risks Related to Cybersecurity, Data Privacy and Intellectual Property” and “Risk Factors-Risks Related to Legal and Regulatory Matters” in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. The Twilio Magic We believe there is a unique spirit to Twilio, manifested in who we are and how we work together. We value and invest in a positive culture of optimism, innovation, and accountability. Our values, which we call the Twilio Magic, remind us every day who we are at our core and guide how we act and how we make decisions. We are Builders . We are Owners . We are Curious . We are Positrons . Twilio.org Communications play a critical role in solving some of the world’s toughest social challenges—it is the foundation for engaging individuals or communities and guiding them toward the resources they need. From empowering people affected by violence with critical resources, to streamlining staff and volunteer coordination, nonprofits leverage communication technology to help individuals build long term well-being and to help communities recover from humanitarian crises. Through Twilio.org, which is a part of our company and not a separate legal entity, we donate and sell our products at a reduced rate to nonprofits and offer grant funding to help scale these organizations’ missions. In 2015, we reserved 1% of Twilio's common stock to fund Twilio.org. As of December 31, 2024, 353,633 shares of Twilio Class A common stock were set aside for Twilio.org charitable activities. In 2024, over 25,000 social impact customers used Twilio products and funding to reach more than 716 million people worldwide. Our Employees and Human Capital Resources We believe that our employees are critical to our success, and in the importance of making sure they are equipped, enabled and empowered to have an impact. As of December 31, 2024, we had a total of 5,535 employees, including 2,470 employees located outside of the United States. We are committed to delivering a comprehensive compensation and benefits program that provides support for all of our employees’ well-being. We provide competitive compensation to attract and retain talented employees, including market-competitive pay, incentive compensation in the form of bonuses or sales commissions, and equity compensation for certain employees. In addition, we offer competitive benefits packages to our full-time employees, subject to the satisfaction of certain eligibility requirements, that are aligned with industry standards and local market practices in each of the countries in which we operate. We ensure that our compensation is fair for all employees, regardless of background. We routinely run a rigorous statistical analysis to ensure compensation is fair, taking into account factors that should impact pay, like role, level, location, and performance. Twilio is an equal opportunity employer, and we are committed to ensuring that Twilio is an inclusive workplace where everyone, regardless of background, is treated fairly and has access to the opportunities, systems, and resources to do their best work. Although we have works council, statutory and/or collective bargaining employee representation obligations in certain countries outside of the United States, none of our U.S. employees are represented by a labor union with respect to their employment. Employees in certain of our non-U.S. subsidiaries have the benefits of collective bargaining arrangements at the national level. We consider our relations with our employees to be good and have not experienced interruptions of operations or work stoppages due to labor disagreements. 10 Table of Contents Corporate Information Twilio Inc. was incorporated in Delaware in March 2008. Our principal executive offices are located at 101 Spear Street, Fifth Floor, San Francisco, California 94105, and our telephone number is (415) 390-2337. Our website address is www.twilio.com. Information contained on, or that can be accessed through, our website does not constitute part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Twilio, the Twilio logo and other trademarks or service marks of Twilio appearing in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the intellectual property of Twilio. Trade names, trademarks and service marks of other companies appearing in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the intellectual property of their respective holders. Information about Geographic Revenue Information about geographic revenue is set forth in Note 16 of our Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements included in Part II, Item 8, “Financial Statements and Supplementary Data” of this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Available Information Our filings are available to be viewed and downloaded free of charge through our investor relations website after we file them with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). Our filings include our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, our Proxy Statement for our annual meeting of stockholders, Current Reports on Form 8-K and other filings with the SEC. Our investor relations website is located at http://investors.twilio.com. The SEC also maintains an Internet website that contains periodic and current reports, proxy statements and other information about issuers, like us, that file electronically with the SEC. The address of that website is www.sec.gov. We webcast our earnings calls and certain events we participate in or host with members of the investment community on our investor relations website. Additionally, we provide notifications of news or announcements regarding our financial performance, including SEC filings, investor events, press and earnings releases, and blogs as part of our investor relations website. Further corporate governance information, including our corporate governance guidelines and code of business conduct and ethics, is also available on our investor relations website under the heading “Governance.” The contents of our websites are not intended to be incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file with the SEC, and any references to our websites herein are provided for convenience only and intended to be inactive textual references only.