Cloud communications services company Twilio Inc. is back on track after beating its first-quarter profit and revenue targets.

The company, which disappointed investors in the last quarter with its poor full year guidance, reported earnings before certain costs such as stock compensation of 5 cents per share on revenue of $233.1 million, up 81% from a year ago. Those numbers include revenue from SendGrid Inc., a provider of cloud email services that Twilio acquired in October last year.

Wall Street had forecast first-quarter earnings of just a penny a share on revenue of $222.8 million.

Twilio Chief Executive Officer Jeff Lawson (pictured) said the company continued to do well on the customer acquisition front, and that SendGrid should provide even more opportunities. As of March 31, Lawson said, Twilio now counts 154,797 active customer accounts, up from 53,985 a year ago.

“The early customer reaction regarding the acquisition of SendGrid has validated our strategy of powering the future of customer engagement on one platform, and we look forward to building this future together on behalf of our customers,” Lawson said.

Although the CEO was clearly keen to justify that $2 billion acquisition, analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Twilio’s incremental platform updates were just as big a factor in its continued growth.

“The combination of communication services and platform integration, for example with Salesforce this quarter, is what keeps executives going back to Twilio to power the communications aspects of their next-generation applications,” Mueller said. “On the product side, the recently introduced support for AMP pages is a key addition, given their rise in popularity. Few software companies can keep growing at 80% level, but Twilio keeps pulling this off.”

Twilio’s outlook for the next quarter also looks good, with the company projecting earnings per share of 2 to 3 cents on revenue of $262 million to $265 million. Wall Street had forecast earnings of 3 cents per share on revenue of just $251.5 million.

Twilio’s shares rose almost 4% in the after-hours trading session.

Photo: Web Summit/Flickr