Anson Funds, an activist investor, has constructed a stake in Twilio worth $50 million, according to someone familiar with the matter who spoke with CNBC. The stake was built while Sagar Gupta was with Anson from Legion Partners, and Anson is now advocating for the sale or business divesture of Twilio.Anson Funds has accumulated a stake in Twilio amounting to around $50 million, according to a person familiar with the matter. The investor has sent a letter to the company's board advocating for the sale of the entire business or, at the minimum, the divestment of its data and applications business, the source added. Sagar Gupta, recently hired by Anson from Legion Partners, spearheaded Legion's activist engagements with Twilio and cloud computing firm Nutanix. In response to the news, Twilio shares rose by as much as 2% at the start of Tuesday's trading but later gave back most of those gains.A Twilio spokesperson said in a statement that the company is "regularly engaging with shareholders and appreciates constructive input that furthers our goal of creating sustainable long-term value".This year has been difficult for Twilio, which provides software for businesses to interact with their clients. The company's stock has gone up by 28% since the beginning of the year, but remains lower than its earlier highs. It implemented a reorganization in February, dividing its business into two new units – Data & Applications and Communications – and cut around 1,500 jobs in February and September. Despite the reorganization, the activist investor has asked the board to consider divesting the former business if a full sale to a strategic buyer is not possible. Massive tech acquisitions have been relatively fewer this year, but some big deals have emerged, such as the $12.5 billion private buyout of survey software company Qualtrics by Silver Lake and CPP Investments, IBM's $4.6 billion acquisition of software maker Apptio, and Cisco's $28 billion takedown of cybersecurity outfit Splunk. Twilio, which was established by CEO and co-founder Jeff Lawson in 2008 and went public four years ago, has a current market cap of $11.6 billion.
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