Twilio Segment (often referred to simply as Segment) is a leading customer data platform that helps companies collect, clean, and unify first-party customer data from web, mobile, server, and cloud sources. With a single API and over 700 pre-built integrations, Segment routes high-quality behavioral and profile data into analytics, marketing, advertising, product, and data warehouse tools, becoming the central data foundation for modern growth and customer experience teams.
Founded in 2012 and incubated out of Y Combinator, Segment quickly became a core piece of infrastructure for digital-first businesses that needed to standardize event tracking and avoid building and maintaining dozens of custom point-to-point integrations. The company raised over $283M in venture funding and grew its customer base into the tens of thousands, including brands like Intuit, FOX, IBM, Levi’s, and MongoDB. In 2020, Segment was acquired by Twilio for approximately $3.2B and now operates as Twilio’s CDP business unit, tightly integrated with Twilio’s messaging, email, and customer engagement products.
The Segment product portfolio centers on several key modules: Connections (the customer data pipeline), Protocols (governance and data quality), Unify (real-time identity resolution and profiles), and Engage (audience building and journey orchestration), plus warehouse-centric capabilities like Reverse ETL and Profiles Sync. Together, these enable companies to build “golden” customer profiles, power advanced audience segmentation, orchestrate multichannel journeys, and feed AI/ML models with clean, identity-resolved data. Segment’s open, vendor-agnostic architecture is designed to work with any data warehouse and a broad ecosystem of SaaS tools, which differentiates it from closed marketing clouds.
In the CDP market, Twilio Segment is consistently positioned as a leader, with IDC citing it as the #1 CDP by market share in recent years. The platform is used by over 25,000 companies and handles trillions of API calls annually, serving both high-growth startups and large global enterprises. Its strengths lie in its integration breadth, developer-friendly APIs, and strong governance and security posture (including SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA eligibility). At the same time, reviewers note that Segment’s powerful capabilities come with a learning curve and a pricing model that can be expensive at very high volumes, especially for data-heavy, consumer-scale businesses.
