8×8 has acquired privately-held Wavecell, a Singapore-based global Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) provider, for approximately $125 million in cash and stock.
The acquisition provides 8×8 with an established technology platform and high-growth revenue business to pursue CPaaS globally and represents a natural expansion of 8×8’s cloud business from Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS), Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS), and Video into the CPaaS market.
The acquisition expands 8×8’s presence into the rapidly growing Southeast Asian market, including Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Hong Kong, with a talented employee base and more than 500 enterprise customers, including Paidy, Tokopedia and Lalamove.
Wavecell also brings an R&D centre in Asia which allows 8×8 to further accelerate growth in product innovation and delivery.
By acquiring Wavecell, 8×8 says it:
- Increases its addressable market to include CPaaS.
- Enhances the only fully-owned end-to-end cloud communications platform.
- Expands its global presence and coverage.
Founded in 2010, Wavecell offers a complete CPaaS solution including a cloud-first API platform with SMS, chat apps, video interaction and voice APIs that enable mission-critical enterprise applications such as Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging, omnichannel customer journeys and multi-factor authentication at scale.
“The market opportunity in CPaaS is growing rapidly, and this acquisition enables us to quickly provide these services to our customers around the world,” said Vik Verma, CEO of 8×8. “8×8 is now the only cloud provider that owns the full, global-scale, cloud-native technology stack offering voice, video, messaging, and contact centre delivered both as pre-packaged applications and as enterprise-class APIs. We’re excited to welcome the Wavecell employees to the 8×8 family. We now have a significant market presence in Asia and expect to continue to expand in the region and globally in order to meet evolving customer requirements.”
“With the acquisition of Wavecell, we can now offer customers enterprise-class APIs, bringing a CPaaS solution to our global communications platform,” said Dejan Deklich, Chief Product Officer of 8×8, Inc. “Customer demand for CPaaS is accelerating and now organisations can easily add real-time communication capabilities that include SMS, chat apps, voice and video to improve the experience for their end-customers. The integration of all the API’s and data into one CPaaS platform gives 8×8 customers unprecedented ability to engage with end users in true omni-channel fashion and understand the full customer journey.”
“We are delighted to become part of 8×8, one of the world’s leading cloud communications platforms. Now is the right time to leverage the global expansion of UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS services to better serve our customers’ growing demand for communication services and to continually drive greater innovation,” said Olivier Gerhardt, CEO and Co-Founder of Wavecell.
