Salesforce Buying Customer Engagement Firm Braze for $5.6 Billion

Salesforce Braze

Salesforce says it will pay $5.6 billion to acquire customer engagement platform Braze.

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    “Every interaction is an opportunity to wow your customers,” Patrick Stokes, president of applications and marketing at Salesforce, said in a news release announcing the planned acquisition Tuesday (Oct. 20).

    “Most of that wow comes from knowing your customer, and responding at just the right moment. Braze was built to turn live customer behavior into personalized engagement at scale. Bringing that capability together with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, CRM, and Data 360 will deliver that wow moment in every customer interaction.”

    According to the release, Braze helps marketers strengthen customer relationships by responding to customer behavior in real time, coordinating personalized experiences on platforms including mobile apps, websites, email, and WhatsApp.

    After the close of the acquisition, Braze’s real-time engagement and AI decisioning capabilities are expected to complement the four layers of Salesforce’s architecture — Data 360, Customer 360, Agentforce, and SIForce, the company said.

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    Bill Magnuson, Braze’s co-founder and CEO, noted that this year saw the company ship at the fastest pace in its history, with BrazeAI helping marketers bring ideas to life faster.

    “Salesforce shares our commitment to marketers, and we’ll continue building as Braze and investing in the Braze community of customers and partners who built this company with us,” he added. “Salesforce’s platform will help us innovate faster and together we’ll help marketers around the world build deeper, more lasting relationships with their customers.”

    Writing in a PYMNTS eBook earlier this year, Braze’s senior director of AI solutions consulting Kipp Johnson likened the company’s technology to an F1 racecar: capable of powerful speeds but requiring robust controls.

    “Last year, Braze AI Decisioning Studio made over 17 billion personalized decisions based on each customer’s unique context,” he wrote. “Like an F1 team, this was only possible because of deliberate investment in governance, observability and specialists to manage these programs.”

    The deal marks the latest in a series of acquisitions for Salesforce, which in June said it was due to purchase AI customer service platform Fin for $3.6 billion. The company said that deal would grant it access to Fin’s AI agent, designed to deal with complex customer queries across channels like live chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, phone and Slack.

    Weeks later Salesforce announced it had closed on its acquisition of m3ter, a metering and rating platform for consumption-based monetization, in a deal designed to bring high-volume mediation, metering and rating capabilities to its Agentforce Revenue Management.

    Meanwhile, Business Insider reported last month Salesforce had been in discussions to acquire Listen Labs, an AI-powered customer research platform, for about $2 billion.