8x8 acquires Wavecell to expand cloud communications footprint

Cloud communications provider 8x8 announced Wednesday that it's acquiring Wavecell, a privately-held Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) provider, for approximately $125 million. With Wavecell's enterprise-class APIs, the deal gives 8x8 a foothold in the growing CPaaS market. It will also help expand 8x8's global presence.  

8x8 offers voice, video, chat and contact center solutions with more than 1 million worldwide users. 

Wavecell, meanwhile, offers a cloud-first API platform with SMS, chat apps, video interaction and voice APIs that enable the at-scale deployment of enterprise applications such as Application-to-Person (A2P) messaging, omnichannel customer communications and multi-factor authentication. The company has a footprint in 190 countries through relationships with 192 network operators and business partners.

Twilio is the dominant player in the CPaaS market, while other competitors include Vonage, Nexmo and Bandwidth. 

"The market opportunity in CPaaS is growing rapidly, and this acquisition enables us to quickly provide these services to our customers around the world," 8x8 CEO Vik Verma said in a statement. "8x8 is now the only cloud provider that owns the full, global-scale, cloud-native technology stack offering voice, video, messaging, and contact center delivered both as pre-packaged applications and as enterprise-class APIs."

Additionally, the Singapore-based Wavecell will expand 8x8's presence into the rapidly growing Southeast Asian market, including Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Hong Kong.