SoftBank Acquires 10 Percent of Cloud Computing Company Sinch After Stellar Year

Japanese investment conglomerate SoftBank has purchased a 10.1-percent stake in Swedish cloud computing company Sinch. The move comes after an unprecedented year of growth for Sinch, with the company approaching a 280-percent increase in its stock price.

Stockholm-based Sinch's cloud platform supports messaging, voice and video and handles 40 billion API transactions each year. The company's massive growth this year can be attributed to a giant surge in its user based due to the coronavirus pandemic. Sinch ranks as the the best performing company on the Stoxx Europe 600 index for this year.

“We see clearly how our cloud-based platform helps businesses leverage mobile technology to reinvent their customer experience,” Oscar Werner, CEO of Sinch, told TechCrunch. “Whereas people throughout the world have embraced mobile messaging to interact with friends and family, most businesses have yet to seize this opportunity. We are establishing Sinch as a leader in a global growth market that is still very fragmented, and we’re excited that SoftBank is now helping us realize that vision.”

SoftBank acquired around 3.2 million shares of Sinch for $690 million. The company plans to use the money to fund mergers and acquisitions. Sinch has already acquired SAP (News - Alert) Digital Interconnect, which strives to connect the last mile among enterprises, customers, employees, software and things, earlier this year.

Sinch also acquired Brazilian customer experience technology company Wavy earlier this year, as well as Belgian conversational AI firm Chatlayer. Sinch also expanded its reach into India with the acquisition of cloud communications services firm ACL Mobile.

Sinch was officially founded in 2014 as a spinoff of Swedish international calling company Rebtel (News - Alert). It was acquired by CLX, a Swedish telecom and cloud communications platform as a service (PaaS) company in 2016. CLX decided to unify all its business units under the Sinch name and brand in 2019.