I’m thrilled to announce some big news from the Tercera portfolio – two of our portfolio companies have chosen to join forces to capitalize on the increasing enterprise demand from data and AI transformation.
Zennify, a customer experience technology consultancy specializing in financial services, has acquired Terazo, a digital engineering firm known for its data, API and application engineering expertise. The news was announced formally this week (you can read the announcement here), but this match has been a long time coming.
I’ll go into how this move came to be shortly, but first, let’s address why this is such a pivotal development for both companies.
A voracious demand for data and AI
The ability to modernize and harness data across different clouds, platforms and data silos has become mission numero uno for any leader looking to capitalize on the promise of AI. In its 2025 CIO Agenda, Gartner found “more than 80% of CIOs plan to make investments in foundational capabilities including cybersecurity, GenAI, business intelligence and data analytics, and integration technologies like APIs.”
Over the last 18 months, both Zennify and Terazo have been investing in capabilities and solutions to meet growing demand, but so have thousands of other services firms around the world. This union gives Zennify and Terazo the depth and scale it needs to strengthen existing capabilities and stand out in a crowded market.
Terazo’s experience working with large customers in financial services, as well as other regulated industries like healthcare and life sciences, and energy and utilities, also broadens the addressable market for Zennify.
Opposites attract
Terazo was founded in Richmond, Virginia in 2016 as a company called APIvista. APIvista’s goal was to help businesses open up their data and business processes through APIs (check out co-founder and CEO Mark Wensell’s launch announcement here). Over time, APIvista became Terazo. The team found itself working time and again with Twilio, one of the top communications APIs on the planet, to build modern, omni-channel customer engagement experiences. Terazo has since become Twilio’s largest services partner, so much so that Twilio even invested.
Three years earlier on the West Coast of the U.S., Zennify was founded by the team that implemented Salesforce at HP (perhaps Salesforce’s largest implementation at the time) to help enterprises use the Salesforce CRM platform. Over the last 10 years, Zennify found its niche specializing in financial services, helping mid-size and large banks, insurance and wealth management firms move and optimize mission-critical business processes to the cloud.
On the surface, it might look like an odd pairing – a digital engineering firm and Twilio partner that works across multiple industries joining up with a Salesforce financial services partner.
However, when you pull back the covers, the overlap between the firms becomes clear.
- Both focus on building modern, scalable systems of customer engagement
- Both have been doubling down in data, and Databricks specifically, over the past year
- Both understand the importance of partner alignment and customer outcomes
- Both see a large overlap and opportunity between Salesforce and Twilio customers
A partnership that started over mini golf in a hotel ballroom
Both Zennify and Terazo have been part of the Tercera portfolio since 2021, plenty of time to get to know each other and see how the other company operates. That familiarity became a friendship at the Tercera Leadership Retreat a year ago.
Our annual Tercera Leadership Retreat, which brings together the CEOs and top lieutenants from across our portfolio, is one of the perks of working with an investment firm that only specializes in IT services. It’s a dedicated three days where services leaders get to open up and learn from each other, talk through similar challenges, and in some cases find ways to work together with customers and prospects.
Fortunately, Terazo CEO Mark Wensell and Zennify CEO Chris Contant had plenty of time to get to know each other when a tropical storm forced our afternoon beach games into a carpeted ballroom. Don’t worry, we still had a blast.
During that time, the two began talking about what each other was doing to move into larger accounts, new ecosystems and to capitalize on the AI movement. Those conversations led to more formal discussions in March 2024 to explore a potential merger. Ultimately it wasn’t the right time, but through those discussions, the Terazo and Zennify teams had a chance to go deeper into each others’ businesses and partner in the field.
Fast forward five months later, and those discussions reopened. Partly to join forces on the growing Databricks partnership that both firms had seen as a rapidly evolving opportunity, and partly to add deeper engineering skills within Zennify’s team to deliver more complex enterprise data projects. Both were seeing data modernization programs becoming a bigger requirement with their strategic partners, Salesforce and Twilio, as both leaned more heavily into their AI strategies.
A foundation for future growth
Luckily, the relationships that have been built over the last year should set a solid foundation for the future. As we often say to firms looking for advice on M&A, if you can date before you marry, the odds of success are a lot better.
While acquisitions are never easy, having watched the leadership teams of both companies rally around each other and a mutual vision to create the #1 data and customer experience consultancy for regulated industries, I’m confident of the outcome.
It’ll be an exciting journey for these two teams. If you want to track their progress, visit and bookmark the Zennify site to see what’s on the horizon.
