Quiet Over-Achievers: Twilio and Snowflake Lead the Next Leg of the AI Rally
Twilio’s ascent is powered by the breadth of its 335,000-plus account base and by tangible evidence that AI is lifting wallet share: dollar-based net expansion improved five percentage points year-on-year in the latest quarter, prompting management to raise full-year organic-revenue guidance despite only modest growth in total customer numbers. The appeal is two-fold. First, Twilio embeds large-language-model functionality - think chatbots and sentiment analysis - directly into the same application-programming interfaces that already handle texts, voice calls and emails, bringing AI into production workflows with minimal friction. Second, the stock still trades at barely four times forward sales, a discount to larger cloud peers that leaves room for multiple expansion if execution holds.
Snowflake tells a parallel story from the data-infrastructure side. Nearly 45 percent of its 11,600 customers now tap the firm’s language-model tooling each week, spurring remaining-performance-obligations to jump 34 percent to $6.7 billion - far faster than headline product revenue. Because those obligations represent contracted future sales, they provide unusually clear visibility at a moment when many software vendors face decelerating renewals. Crucially, Snowflake’s addressable market explodes as organisations consolidate petabytes of structured and unstructured data onto a single platform explicitly designed for AI agents; management pegs that market at $342 billion by 2028, more than thirty-times current revenue.
Together, the two companies offer a real-time case study in how AI continues to broaden beyond its most obvious beneficiaries. Twilio monetises the front-end interaction layer, Snowflake the back-end data substrate, and both do so without the capital-intensive risks now dogging chipmakers. If investors are looking for the next wave of AI winners, the message from the tape is clear: watch the software plumbing that turns large models into everyday business tools - because that is where the quiet outperformance is already happening.
