Snapshot
- Ticker: TWLO (NYSE)
- Bucket: Software in the AI Crosshairs
- Q1 2026 position: $116.0M common (921,602 shares, 2.32% of 13F)
- HQ: San Francisco, CA
- Business: Communications platform-as-a-service — APIs for messaging, voice, email, and customer data that developers (and increasingly AI agents) use to reach humans
Business Overview
Twilio sells programmable communications: SMS/messaging APIs, voice, email (SendGrid), verification, and the Segment customer-data platform. Revenue is predominantly usage-based, which made Twilio a post-COVID derating casualty — and now makes it one of the cleanest publicly traded tollbooths on AI-agent traffic, since every agent that calls, texts, or emails a human does so through infrastructure like Twilio’s.
The numbers have inflected. FY2025 revenue was 924M (vs. 945M — the activist-era pivot from growth-at-all-costs to disciplined profitability is complete. Q1 2026 revenue grew 20% YoY to over $1.4B, the fastest growth in more than three years. The standout is voice: +20% YoY driven explicitly by AI use cases — conversational AI agents doing scheduling, support, and sales calls — marking a sixth consecutive quarter of accelerating voice growth. Software add-ons (branded calling, conversational intelligence) both grew over 100% YoY. Full-year 2026 guidance is 14–15% reported revenue growth (9.5–10.5% organic), with a known headwind of ~200bps to non-GAAP gross margin from increased US carrier fees.
Financial Trajectory
| Period | Revenue | Growth | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY2024 | ~$4.46B | +7% | non-GAAP op income $714M |
| FY2025 | $5.07B | +14% | non-GAAP op income 945M |
| Q1 2026 | $1.4B | +20% YoY | fastest growth in 3+ years; voice +20% on AI use cases |
| FY2026 guide | — | +14–15% | ~9.5–10.5% organic; ~200bps carrier-fee gross-margin headwind |
Why Atreides Owns It
Twilio is the largest position in the fund’s Software in the AI Crosshairs sleeve, and it is the bull side of Baker’s SaaS framework. His December 2025 Invest Like the Best argument was that SaaS companies face a “life or death decision” about sacrificing margin to ship AI agents, and that “anything you can verify, you can automate.” Twilio is positioned on the right side of both halves: it doesn’t sell seats that agents replace — it sells the usage that agents generate. When a software vendor or enterprise deploys a voice or messaging agent, Twilio’s metered revenue goes up. The six-quarter acceleration in voice, driven by AI agents, is the thesis showing up in reported numbers.
The position’s construction shows a fund that tested, verified, and scaled: a 115K-share toehold in Q1 2025 (250M and fully exited within three quarters on AI coding-agent fears — Twilio has been held and grown through five consecutive quarters, the most consistent accumulation in Atreides’ software book. The Segment CDP adds a second-order angle: agents need clean customer data and context, and Twilio owns a distribution-advantaged data layer to supply it.
Position History
| Quarter | Type | Shares/Notional | Value | % of 13F |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q4 2024 | — | not held | — | — |
| Q1 2025 | Common | 115,357 | $11,294,604 | 0.34% |
| Q2 2025 | Common | 730,300 | $90,820,108 | 2.52% |
| Q3 2025 | Common | 965,763 | $96,663,219 | 1.88% |
| Q4 2025 | Common | 716,946 | $101,978,399 | 1.25% |
| Q1 2026 | Common | 921,602 | $115,955,964 | 2.32% |
A textbook Atreides build: small initial position, aggressive scale-up once the data confirmed, then trading around a core (trimmed ~26% in Q4 2025, re-added ~29% in Q1 2026). No options overlay — this is a straight accumulation, now at its high-water mark in both shares and dollars.
Risks
- Messaging (the majority of revenue) is a lower-margin, commodity-adjacent business; rising US carrier fees are already a ~200bps gross-margin headwind in 2026, and Twilio has limited pricing power against carriers.
- The AI-agent voice opportunity attracts direct competition: hyperscaler CPaaS offerings (Amazon Connect), Sinch, Bandwidth, and voice-AI startups building their own telephony stacks.
- If enterprises consolidate agent deployment onto model-provider platforms (OpenAI, Google) that integrate communications natively, Twilio could be disintermediated from the highest-value layer.
- Organic growth (9.5–10.5% guided) is materially below headline reported growth; the 20% Q1 print flatters the underlying trend.
- Usage-based revenue cuts both ways — an enterprise-spending downturn or AI-pilot winter would show up in Twilio’s numbers immediately.
Sources
- Twilio Q4 and Full Year 2025 results (Twilio press release)
- Twilio Q1 2026 earnings transcript (The Motley Fool, Apr 30, 2026)
- Twilio Q1 2026 slides: 20% revenue growth, raised guidance (Investing.com)
- Twilio Q1 FY2026: accelerating voice and messaging demand (Futurum)
- Gavin Baker — Invest Like the Best EP.451 (Dec 9, 2025)