Twilio Segment
More info
- Creator
- Peter Reinhardt et al.
- Released
- Owner
- Twilio
- Type
- Customer data platform (CDP)
A customer data platform that collects user events once and forwards them to every analytics and marketing tool, instead of each tool getting its own tracking snippet.
Founded in 2011 by Peter Reinhardt and three MIT classmates. The product was almost an accident: their original lecture tool flopped, but the little logging router they'd built on the side turned out to be what everyone wanted. A single analytics.track() call replaced a dozen embedded scripts.
Segment normalises events into a shared schema and fans them out to hundreds of destinations — warehouses, ad networks, email tools — at once. Twilio bought it in 2020 for around $3.2 billion and made it the hub of its customer-data push. The category it helped define, the CDP, then became a buzzword with as many definitions as there were vendors.