Shares of cloud communications platform Twilio climbed Friday after the stock was upgraded and named among the "highest-growth" tech companies by JPMorgan Securities.
"We believe investors lack awareness of the volume of customers that come to
Twilio," analyst Mark Murphy wrote in a Friday note to clients. "Many [of Twilio's] competitors lack the engineering headcount to achieve this."
Murphy upgraded the stock to "overweight" from "neutral," maintaining a price target of $36 per share. Shares of Twilio closed up more than 4 percent on Friday.
The San Francisco-based company's core revenue has grown more than 70 percent for at least the last 12 consecutive quarters, Murphy pointed out in his note.
"It is difficult to name many other recurring revenue streams growing faster at a comparable scale," he said.
Further, e-commerce giant Amazon is becoming more of a "partner" with Twilio, rather than a competitor, by using Twilio for its Amazon Web Services division, Murphy added.
Twilio's "high-profile customer list," which includes Uber, WhatsApp and Airbnb, shouldn't be taken lightly by investors, he said.
Twilio closed Friday at $28.17 per share and is down over 2 percent year to date. The messaging start-up went public last June.
TWLO year-to-date performance
Source: FactSet