Twilio Inc. (TWLO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. I am Meta Marshall, past communication software analyst. But stepping back into my role, while Elizabeth is on maternity leave. We are delighted to have Twilio. We have Rodney from IR, who's pitching in as well; and then Aidan Viggiano, CFO.

So Aidan, thanks so much for being here. It's been a little over a year since your Investor Day, where you laid out kind of the 3-year financial framework, 21% to 22% operating margins by 2027, $3 billion of cumulative free cash flow also targeting kind of annual average 50% of free cash flow being returned to shareholders. Where did you exceed your own expectations in the first year of this plan? And where is there still kind of work to do?

Yes. No, I'd say we delivered a really solid year in 2025. We came into the year focused on execution. And I'd say we delivered across the board. So starting with growth. From an organic growth perspective, we grew 13% for the year that compared to 9% in 2024. So we saw growth reaccelerate, which is a huge priority for us. And importantly, when you look at where the growth came from, it wasn't just one product, it wasn't just one channel, it wasn't just one sales or industry vertical, it was pretty broad. At the same time, when we grew revenue 13%, we reduced our OpEx by 1%. And that's following a year in 2024, where we held OpEx flat. So I think we've consistently demonstrated that we take getting operating leverage in this business and financial discipline very seriously. It's been a huge priority for myself as well as our CEO, Khozema. From a cash flow perspective, we generated nearly $950 million in cash. We guided to over $1 billion in 2026. We're generating a lot of cash. We reduced stock-based compensation as a percentage of revenue by another 2 points. And then we returned 90% of our free cash flow to shareholders in the form of share repurchases. So I'd say from a financial perspective, we executed really well. I mean that doesn't mean everything was perfect, right? There's definitely more to do. I'd say one area in 2025, where we started out slow was gross profit dollar growth, right? That was slower in the beginning of the year. We definitely exited the year where we wanted to be. It was double digits in Q4. And then I'd say, lastly, from a cost perspective, I still think there's more we can do. We're not untapped in terms of the ideas that we have. And in particular, I think there's more we can do around the shape and optimization of our workforce, what we call workforce planning as well as, I would say, just leaning in more to automation and AI. So still some opportunities ahead of us for sure.

Awesome. There has been this bull case around Twilio that AI removes -- or removes barriers to software development and names like Twilio play an enabler role in bringing those products to consumers. Maybe Khozema would deem that as a customer experience layer to the Internet. Just how are you seeing that show up in Twilio today?

Yes. So we're a vital layer in the stack that provides kind of infrastructure for global scalable communications, right? So as companies are building agentic cases and agentic experiences, they need trusted communications to kind of deliver the last mile. That's what Twilio does. I'd say it shows up in our business, I'd say, principally in two areas right now. If you think about it from a product perspective, voice is where it's kind of all starting. It's a very natural way to communicate and that business or that product, I should say, grew in the high teens in Q4. That's its highest growth rate since 2022. So you're seeing it there. It's not the only thing that's driving voice, but it is part of that uplift we're seeing in voice growth. The other place you'd see it in our business is self-serve. So the self-serve channel grew 28% in Q4. It's been growing strong all year. A lot of AI natives are building on the Twilio platform. It's our -- we're probably the best known CPaaS brand. So when they need communications capabilities to be built into their product, they often come to us. It's, again, not the only thing that's driving our self-serve channel, and it's still, I'd say, relatively small in terms of dollars. But if I had to say where it is showing up in our business today, I'd say voice and self-serve are predominantly where you see it.

Yes. I mean acceleration and double-digit growth are always a good way to demonstrate that. There's always a bear case to go with any bull case. There has been kind of questions about whether some of the LLM themselves could eventually build kind of this stack layer. How do you think about competitive risk? And what is the moat -- kind of better describe the moat that prevents this kind of disintermediation?

Yes. I think it starts with what we call our super network. And think about that as like the nearly 5,000 unique carrier connections that we have around the world. there's no software that's going to build those connections, right? On top of the connections, we operate in like over 180 countries, right? Each country has unique regulatory requirements, unique compliance requirements. So you have to be able to adhere to that on a global scale. And then your platform needs to be trusted, right? It's got to have the ability to detect fraud, mitigate fraud to optimize routing, intelligent routing and things like that, know your customer type requirements. They all have to be built into the platform. I mean, it's taken us 17 years to kind of build those capabilities but they're hugely important in a communications context. And then on top of that, you obviously need to build the software that will enable a functional platform. So I'd say it's a pretty massive undertaking to kind of replicate what we've done. We used to get this question or a similar question, I'd say, as it relates to the hyperscalers. Why could they just do what you do? And in some cases, they've built out some communications capabilities. But for the most part, they're actually our partners and customers today. So I kind of see it in a similar light.

Right. Yes. So maybe you just talked about kind of the revenue growth for the year, it came in at 13%. You guided Q1 to 10% to 11% ahead of the 7% to 8% you laid out on the last Q1. But your 2026 organic guide is 8% to 9%. To what extent does that gap or kind of deceleration reflect conservatism?

Yes, I'd say I feel really good about how we're starting 2026. Like we're definitely starting 2026 in a stronger growth position than we did 2025. When you look at Q1, we guided to 10% to 11% organic, as you just said. That's our highest quarterly growth guidance in 3 years. In addition to that, we are guiding the year to 8% to 9%, 2026 to 8% to 9%. So that's a full 100 basis points higher than what we guided 2025 when we came into the year. So you are seeing the strength that we've talked about in this business, the broad-based strength that we're seeing flow through into our guidance. Now importantly, our revenue model is usage-based, right? We're not seat-based, we're not license-based. We're a usage-based business. And so as we've said kind of consistently, we do put -- we do plan prudently, right? It's especially as you're thinking 4 quarters out, our model is less predictable. And so with that comes a certain level of just inherent or less visibility. So we do plan prudently when we guide.

Got it. One of the further evidences of kind of the reacceleration you guys saw was the DBNE or the dollar-based net expansion rate climbed to 109% from 106% kind of earlier in the year. Just what are some of the factors behind that improvement? And how are you thinking about that trajectory going forward?

Yes, we've seen really steady improvement in the DBNE rate. Obviously, DBNE and organic growth are very highly correlated. But when you think about our business, right, we have over 400,000 customers. So in any given period, volume growth with our existing customer base is what kind of drives the numbers. if I had to kind of point out two areas, maybe from a product perspective, where we saw strength and acceleration, I'd say voice and messaging were really strong and accelerating kind of throughout the year. And then from a sales channel perspective, we talked about self-serve a little bit, but ISVs were another area where we saw strength. And those -- I'd say those are the two sales channels that principally drove that kind of acceleration in dollar-based net expansion. But I'd say at the most basic level, when you look at that number, volume is the primary driver and then I'd say, second, cross-sell within our existing portfolio.

Okay. You mentioned kind of the self-serve channel earlier being kind of an early AI indicator. Is this primarily AI native developers landing on the platform? Just how do you kind of convert those over time to an enterprise relationship?

It's AI -- we're definitely seeing AI start-ups on the platform, but it's broader than that. They're not driving all of the growth in the self-serve. So I'd say it's more than just that -- and when we look at the self-serve channel, so again, it grew like 28% in Q4, it had a really strong 2025 overall. It's both new customer acquisition, new customer growth as well as expansion with our existing customer base. So we've seen, really, strength in both and it's not really by accident like we put a ton of work into the self-serve platform. I'd say a couple of years ago, we probably let it get away from us. But really, at the end of the day, this is our core customer acquisition engine. And so the product team over the last 18 to 24 months has done a ton to make onboarding more simplified to put tooling in the self-serve experience for things like regulatory. They have agentic capabilities built into the platform to recommend products. They've got observability tools and things that allow customers to remediate issues really quickly. And then I'd say more so today than at any point in history, customers can access all of our -- or more of our products in one console. So we've made it really easy for customers, and that's a big part of why we're seeing the growth there. In terms of what -- how to think about the conversion to enterprise, like, yes, absolutely, we see self-serve customers converting to enterprise or managed accounts regularly there's a threshold at which we convert to a managed account. We don't disclose what that is. But I will say that the work that we've done around self-serve, everything I just said -- but also in addition to that, we actually have agents kind of scoring all the leads that come in the self-serve channel. They pass the highest quality leads over to our DSR, our small group of kind of digital sales reps that handle the highest efficacy leads. That has allowed us to be so much more productive and efficient in the self-serve channel that we've been able actually to increase the threshold which we kind of pass things to the direct kind of sales team. But we have a really healthy balance, I'd say, between the direct sales team as well as the self-serve. And we've seen strength in both in '25, and we expect that to continue in '26.

Okay. Another area where you've been seeing strength and this kind of been a multiyear initiative is around the ISVs. They grew 26% year-over-year in Q4 and kind of the number of large deals increased 36%. And just how are you -- I know that there's been a multiyear initiative, but how are ISVs embedding Twilio into their products and kind of pulling through these enterprise scale customers?

Yes. Well, I mean we're seeing it every day. We have a number of different ISVs, and they range from very large ISVs to much smaller, really run the gamut. And they're definitely pulling Twilio through, embedding our communications capabilities into their platform. And I'd say we're absolutely seeing enterprise-type deals or scale deals, as you said, converting. We actually talked about one of them in our Q4 earnings call. There was a 9-figure deal, the largest deal in Twilio's history with a marketing automation company that was an ISV. And so that's the -- that's obviously on the larger end, but those are the types of deals that we're signing. That was a renewal so it's not all incremental. But I think importantly, as it relates to the ISV channel, it's like a very efficient way for us to go to market, right? The ISV does all the heavy lifting from a customer acquisition perspective. It allows us to tap into a market typically with smaller businesses that would be otherwise inefficient for us to do. And importantly, when we look at a lot of the ISVs that are operating with Twilio, they typically start on one channel, but they very quickly adopt multiple channels. So if they start an e-mail that will adopt messaging and voice and in many cases, some of our software add-ons.

Got it. As voice and AI-driven products grow as a portion of the mix, just how do we think about kind of the gross margin profile evolving over the next 2 to 3 years?

Yes. So I think a couple of things as it relates to gross margins. And for us, we try not to fix it on that metric. Like we look at gross profit dollar growth, we think that's the important metric to measure for the business. But we do have products like Voice, many of our software add-ons, e-mail very high-margin products. And as those products continue to grow and accelerate in growth, that is great. That's great from a margin perspective, but more importantly, it's great in terms of the gross profit dollar accretion that it can provide to the company. We do have a messaging business that's 58% of our revenue. That business carries with it lower gross margins. I think you're obviously aware of that. So in any given period in the short term, like if messaging growth accelerates, it will drive down the margin rate. Even though we look at messaging on a unit economics basis, if it makes sense from a gross profit dollar perspective to do the business, that's the right thing for Twilio, even though it may have a negative effect on the margin. In addition to that, the U.S. carriers have increased carrier fees over the course of the last since the middle of last year and then T-Mobile and AT&T announced that they were going to increase this year. So we do have this effective carrier fees kind of flowing through our gross margins that will depress our kind of reported gross margins. But again, we're really more focused on the gross profit dollar growth. That's how we run the business. That's the metric on which we hold the teams accounted for.

Okay. Got it. stock-based compensation has come under, obviously, a lot of scrutiny of late. You guys have brought yours down meaningfully over the past couple of years. Just how confident are you in that path to bring some of that stock-based compensation down, move more towards cash compensation to kind of compete for engineering talent, particularly in AI?

Yes. So we've done a lot on stock-based compensation. So maybe just to revisit kind of the journey we've been on. It's been a multiyear journey. It's one that Khozema and I undertook kind of in 2023, 2024 and again in 2025. And so the things that we've done, first, we've kind of limited participation, right? Certain levels, certain functions in the organization no longer get equity. We've differentiated further by geography and even within certain countries, even further based on where people are located in terms of the amount of equity that they get. We introduced a cash bonus program, to your point on shifting to cash. The company's first-ever broad-based cash bonus program went into place in 2024, and that was all in an effort to mix away from equity towards cash. And then last year, we shifted our refresh brands from 4 years to 3 years. Like we've done many things over the course of a number of years to really get stock-based compensation down. As a result, the size of our equity grants are down 70% on a share count and on a dollar basis. Our SBC as a percentage of revenue is like 12% today, it was [ 22%-ish ] when we started this journey, it will get down to 10% in 2027. Our net burn rate, which is the metric we look at because if you look at stock-based compensation dilution, they're all backward looking metrics. Net burn is what we're granting in year. It's the number we can control. We want that to be less than 3%. It was 1.5% in 2025. So we put a ton of effort into...

I'd like to talk about this because this is...

But I think importantly, like what we found is that from a hiring perspective, from a retention perspective, we really haven't seen an impact. We do have a unique advantage in that we are remote first, that's attractive to many. But when you look at metrics like our average tenure of employee, like it's been steadily increasing, that speaks to retention, and when you look at our conversion rates on hires, it's been really high. And so we see success on both, and we feel pretty good about the structure of the compensation we have today and the ability to be competitive in the market.

Okay. I think this whole room wants to hear what you just said from many others. So free cash flow was $945 million in 2025. You're guiding to over $1 billion in 2026. You returned 90% through buybacks last year, well above your target. Just how do we think about kind of the right level going forward?

The right level of buyback. So we said at our Investor Day last January that we returned 50% of our free cash flow to shareholders over the 3-year kind of framework period. We did 90% in 2025. Obviously, where it makes sense to buy back more, we have the flexibility to do that. We proved that in 2025. I think as I think about 2026, maybe a couple of factors consider. We have $1.1 billion remaining on the authorization, the existing authorization kind of coming into this year. We have a really strong balance sheet and we're generating a lot of cash. I think that affords us optionality and flexibility as we think about buybacks and capital allocation more broadly.

Okay. Twilio had obviously done some larger acquisitions in the past. You disclosed the Stych acquisition, now you've kind of focused on smaller acquisitions. You just did the Stych acquisition in the Q3, which was basically kind of a talent acquisition under $100 million. Identity feels adjacent to the core, but it's kind of a crowded space. Can you just kind of walk through some of the logic on that acquisition?

Sure. I'm going to kick it over to Rodney.

Sure. Yes. I mean this is already an area we play a huge role in today, right? We play a central role in helping businesses have confidence that the consumers they're engaging with are, in fact, their customers. And so I'm sure everybody loves getting those 6-digit onetime passwords. Those are probably coming from Twilio. But above and beyond that, we're not just executing the messaging workflow or the voice call or the passkey or the sound network authentication, like we're actually doing the verification of the back end, right? So we are running the pattern matching in the background. We are also running the algorithms in the background to identify fraudulent messages so that you as a customer are not on the hook for them and you're not then authenticating users that are not your users. And so this is an area where our customers already rely on us very heavily. But in a world where you're going to have more agents doing the bidding of not just companies, but potentially for consumers as well, there's going to have to be a neutral control plane that can authenticate those parties. So if Nike has an agent that's going to interact with me, I now want to have confidence that, that agent is representing Nike and that when I hand over my credit card, I'm actually going to receive the shoes that I'm expecting to get and not just hand over my credit card to a fraudulent actor. And so there's now a much greater surface area for fraud as a result of AI. And so we think that with the Stych acquisition, they are an agentic authentication platform, we can now extend that capability into a more agentic authentication identity framework. And then even as you think about like agent to agent communications, how do both parties have confidence that they're representing what they say they are and then take it one step further, when one of those agents need to reintroduce a human in the loop, how do you maintain that level of trust and security between all those different parties. And so we think this is a natural adjacency for the platform. In terms of buying Stych, it was sort of a classic build versus buy decision. This was something that was on kind of our medium-term to long-term product road map already. it was just a fantastic team, kind of the rightsized asset. They're local, they're here in San Francisco. And so for all the reasons that I just laid out, it made sense to go out and acquire an asset to pull that road map opportunity forward.

And how are you -- just as you expand kind of the AI road map, how are you thinking about that build versus buy?

Yes. I mean, so we have, obviously, a road map we're executing to, some short-term medium-term, longer-term deliverables. And we have an M&A game board kind of that we overlay against that, right? We're obviously always kind of evaluating that build versus buy. I have a guy on my team that owns kind of that core debt process, but he's very closely partnered with the product team and in constant conversation around where might it make sense just in an attempt to accelerate the road map to buy versus build and so that's kind of like a constant process that we're undertaking. I'd say the R&D team has proven -- we talked a little bit about the buy, but the R&D team has proven that they've kind of increased their execution velocity, right? They've shipped more product, RCS, branded calling, conversation relay, conversational intelligence. So I think we have a nice balance today. When we think about M&A, we do like the Stych-type model, right, which is like a modestly sized deal. It's a tech talent tuck-in. It accelerates our product road map or allows us to kind of jump one, two, three years ahead in our road map in terms of those capabilities.

All right. Perfect. The segment CDP business modestly improved growth in 2025. Just how should we think about kind of segment contribution going forward as it relates to kind of a communications plus AI basis?

Yes, we don't really break segment out anymore, right? It was a business unit. We've shifted to a functional model. So those teams are now embedded within our product and our go-to-market teams. But importantly, it's a hugely strategic access for us. Like building -- and the strategy is really building those data capabilities that segment brings into the core Twilio platform. And we're working on a number of different products around customer memory, persistent memory and channel orchestration and segments a huge unlock in being able to do that. So we're just in private beta on some of these capabilities, but we're going to talk more about everything we're doing with regards to that at our Signal conference in May.

Okay. You talked about pricing actions in a few areas of the business. Just how do you think about kind of your pricing strategy kind of coming into the year?

Yes. We're always evaluating our pricing strategy, as can imagine. We're constantly looking at the different regions, the different products because our -- a lot of our communications tend to be local, like think messaging or voice, like it is pretty -- price increases tend to be geographically targeted. But I'd say we're always looking at a series of price increases in any given year. It doesn't have a huge impact on the business in a year and the reason for that is that as you kind of increase prices, it certainly impacts the self-serve business in the short term. But our more material kind of enterprise, ISV scale type accounts, like it will take probably 1 to 3 years to kind of flow through those contracts. So it just takes time to kind of flow through the portfolio. So when I think about like growth and the impact of pricing, it's probably a distant third to volume and cross-sell. I'd put kind of pricing as probably a distant third in terms of the contribution.

Okay. You mentioned earlier, obviously, that you had grown operating margins in 2025. You mentioned kind of -- you plan to kind of continue to do that into 2026. Just how are you -- you mentioned kind of AI being a piece of kind of operational efficiencies? But just how should we think about what are the levers to kind of get further operating margin leverage out of the business?

Yes. I think it's principally in two areas. So I mentioned like this term we call workforce planning. So if I think about the journey we've been on. We always kind of thought about it as like a multistep journey on getting operating leverage in the business, reducing OpEx similar to kind of the SBC story. So Obviously, step one was rightsizing the organization, and we largely did that. At the peak, we were like 9,000 heads. We've been around 5,500 heads for, I don't know, 1.5 years, a few of years or something like that, yes. So for a while now. And so over the last year and the work is still ongoing, like it's now looking at the structure of each team and making sure it's optimized, does it have the right number of layers? Does it have the -- do managers have the right span of control? Are we optimized from a geography perspective in terms of the type of work being done located in the right place? And so we've done a ton in a lot of our teams. There's still more work to be done there. And then I'd say optimization kind of from a technology perspective. I think there's areas where we've really leaned into AI, and we're seeing the benefits of that. Obviously, customer support, customer service is an obvious use case. The other is self-serve. I kind of talked about the fact that all of our inbound leads come in through an AI agent. The agent screens them, passes the highest quality leads on to our DSRs. That has really resulted in a higher conversion rate within our self-serve funnel. I think in other functions, R&D, we're definitely leveraging the tools, G&A, like in my collections team, we're leveraging some tools. It's just not I'd say driving a material level of efficiency for us yet as an organization. So I think that, that's a big opportunity still ahead of us.

Okay. So it's probably like optimizing team locations first and then...

Yes. So that's like work we've kind of initiated. And I'd say automation is underway. It's not that we're not doing anything. I just don't think the -- I think it's more of an opportunity ahead of us.

The low hanging fruit?

Yes. Exactly.

So you articulated how Twilio is positioning itself is kind of this foundational infrastructure layer for AI while simultaneously focusing on kind of these higher-margin software products and maintaining strong free cash flow generation. Just as you balance these priorities over the next 3 to 5 years, just are there areas where you would like to invest kind of more back into the business? Or just how are you balancing kind of both of those initiatives?

Yes. So like when I think about our capital allocation priorities, I say, first and foremost, is organic growth, right? And so it's really investing in product innovation. You'll see some of that in our 2026 guidance where your OpEx is up a bit, like we are investing more in product. We have a strong road map. An exciting road map ahead of us. So investing in our organic growth is a priority. I'd say -- but doing it efficiently, which I think we've proven we can do. I'd say second is returning capital to shareholders. We've proven over the last 3 years that buyback is something that we are willing to do. We have an existing authorization. We returned a lot of capital to shareholders. That's a priority from a capital allocation perspective. And I'd say the third one is efficient M&A. Again, we like that kind of Stych model where it's modestly priced, accelerates our road map. So we look at those 3, I'd say those 3 are kind of our priorities. We're always kind of assessing where we can get the -- create the most value. That's something that's just part of how we operate every day. But I've kind of put it into those kind of core 3 buckets.

Okay. Any questions from the audience?

[indiscernible]

The question was about voice acceleration and kind of what led to that given it might be counterintuitive?

Yes. And I'll start and Rodney can certainly jump in. I think a lot of it is like agentic use cases. If you think about all the agents that are being built, like they do need communications channels to engage, saying the customer support, customer service type engagement. If a customer calls in, they're working through an agent, right? We enable the voice kind of communications for those types of use cases. So that's like a perfect example where we're seeing it. But it's not all AI-driven. Like in some cases, we are seeing our ISVs expand across multiple channels. Those tend to be our larger ISVs. They may have started, it may be a marketing kind of automation type company where they're adopting multiple channels. So we see it broadly. I would say it's certainly what AI native. It's definitely with ISVs and it's also with our enterprise customers. It's not just one channel, which I actually think is a good thing.

And the other dynamic I'd point out was like you now scale voice programmatically in a way that you just couldn't before, right? Like if you wanted to have x number of concurrent phone calls, you also needed x number of humans in the contact center somewhere, which is very costly, like if you want it to be always on, it means you're employing those people 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You don't have those same dynamics in voice now, right? Like it's a purely software-defined solution to what is historically kind of a software plus human capital problem. And in that transition, like if you're moving, for the lack of better terms, you're moving minutes and calls out of that legacy contact center. That's an arena that we don't have a ton of exposure to today. But if you're moving that into an always-on AI-powered software-defined contact center, that's an arena where we have a ton of customers, like whether it's existing ISVs or incumbents or many of the AI start-ups, most of whom have chosen Twilio as their core infrastructure provider for communications, it doesn't matter if it's an agent or human, but we can participate in that software-defined ecosystem much more consistently than in like that legacy contact center situation. The other element, though, is there's now a lot more complexity in that interaction, right? So you're not just providing connecting point A to point B in that communication. You also know have to do all the processing in the middle of that call too, because when you and I are communicating, our brands are doing it. Now that's being fed into a model, that model needs to spell a response that needs to be converted into a speech into a language model, speech model. And then it needs to be said back to the consumer and call it less than 500 milliseconds, otherwise, they will get frustrated. There will be a pause, they'll hit the zero button, and then they'll try to get back to a human at the other day. So now there's actually a lot more work that we can do on behalf of our customers at that infrastructure layer to just make that call work smoothly and the Sierras, the Decagons, the PolyAIs, the EliseAIs of the world, they can focus on building the best platform experience for their customers and the best sort of customer experience for the end consumer who is interacting with that agent.

All right. Perfect. Well, Aidan and Rodney, thanks so much for being here today.

Yes, great. Thank you. Good to see you again, Meta.