Vonage Adds Programmable Video with TokBox Acquisition

**Editor’s Note: Please click here for a recap of the biggest channel-impacting merger and acquisition news from April and May.**

Vonage gains video with its acquisition of TokBox, a Telefónica subsidiary, for $35 million.

TokBox provides WebRTC and programmable video, and allows enterprises to add live video, voice and messaging into their existing websites, mobile applications and IoT devices.

David Pearson, Vonage’s chief financial officer, said acquisitions continue to be a “core part of our strategy to expand our total addressable market and accelerate our pace of product innovation, while providing new solutions to our customers to drive better business outcomes.”

Vonage’s Alan Masarek

“With TokBox, our API portfolio expands beyond voice, SMS and IP messaging to include global leadership in programmable video,” said Alan Masarek, Vonage’s CEO. “TokBox significantly expands our total addressable market, and it is a major step towards global leadership in cloud communications.”

According to IDC, the U.S. programmable video market will be a $7.4 billion opportunity by 2022, representing more than a 140 percent, four-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR). This growth is being driven by three key factors: the adoption of WebRTC; the reduction in cost and complexity; and the prevalence of video-capable devices, coupled with improvements in network infrastructure, which minimize video latency.

TokBox has more than 2,300 global customers across a range of applications, including online education, financial institutions, help desks, telemedicine, field services, interactive broadcasts and social media. More than 1,700 mobile apps use the TokBox software development kit across Android and iOS.

“TokBox established itself early on as an industry leader based on the belief that the WebRTC standard had significant potential to drive a wave of innovation and value creation,” Scott Lomond, TokBox’s CEO. “As WebRTC has gained traction, our growth has been supported by the ability of our platform to simplify the integration of live video into websites and mobile apps for developers.”

Last month, Vonage announced its Vonage Business Cloud (VBC) platform now includes expanded capabilities with the VonageFlow proprietary workstream collaboration offering.