Segment

Segment, legally Segment.io, Inc., is a San Francisco company that sells customer data infrastructure: software and APIs that let a business collect customer events once, clean them, and send them to analytics, marketing automation and data warehouse tools through a single integration instead of many one-off connections. It came out of the Y Combinator Summer 2011 batch, and Y Combinator lists 2011 as its founding year. Peter Reinhardt was co-founder and chief executive, and Ilya Volodarsky is listed by Y Combinator as a founder. By 2019 the company said thousands of companies in 71 countries used the product, including Intuit, IBM, Levi's, VMware, Atlassian, Bonobos and Instacart.

Segment's early rounds are not itemized here because no primary filing or company release for them was available. The round that is documented is the Series D, announced on April 2, 2019: $175 million co-led by Accel, GV and Meritech Capital, with participation from Thrive Capital, Y Combinator Continuity, eVentures and Sapphire Ventures. The company said the round brought its total capital raised to $284 million. At the time it employed more than 350 people, with offices in San Francisco, New York, Vancouver and Dublin, and by August 2019 it reported more than 440 employees.

On October 12, 2020, Twilio signed a merger agreement to acquire Segment.io, Inc. for aggregate consideration of $3.2 billion, payable in Twilio Class A common stock, with cash paid to unaccredited holders and holders of vested equity awards. Twilio's Form 8-K reports that the deal closed on November 2, 2020, with Segment securityholders receiving an aggregate of 9,522,489 Twilio shares. Segment now operates as a product line inside Twilio, and the segment.com domain redirects to Twilio's site.

For investors, Segment is a developer-tool company that became an enterprise data platform and exited through a strategic, all-stock sale to a public acquirer about nine years after its accelerator batch. The $3.2 billion price was a little over eleven times the $284 million the company had raised in total. Because the consideration was Twilio stock, what Segment's backers actually realized depended on when they sold Twilio shares after the November 2020 close, a timing risk that is common when a private company is sold to a public buyer for equity. Accel and GV had backed the company before the Series D, which put them in the cap table well before the late-stage money arrived.