Salesforce acquires Braze for $5.66B to expand AI marketing
Salesforce is buying customer engagement platform Braze for US$5.66 billion (approximately A$8.08 billion). The deal signals a major push to strengthen Salesforce’s AI-driven marketing capabilities.
Braze, founded in 2011 under the name Appboy, helps marketers respond to consumer behavior in real time. The platform coordinates personalized experiences across mobile apps, websites, email, SMS, and WhatsApp. It serves roughly 2,770 customers, including Canva, Dairy Queen, Equinox, Instacart, Urban Outfitters, and Venmo.
What Salesforce Gets
The acquisition combines Braze’s real-time engagement technology with three Salesforce products: Marketing Cloud, its customer data platform, and Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI agent offering.
For marketers, the stated benefit is turning live customer signals into personalized interactions across multiple channels while connecting marketing activity with the broader customer relationship across sales, commerce, and service.
Braze handles high-volume B2C engagement with a cloud-native architecture. It continuously updates customer profiles and adapts journeys based on behavior, supporting trillions of messages and journey actions each year. Its BrazeAI product helps marketers determine which content, offers, and channels to use, plus when to reach customers.
Salesforce Data Cloud.
Patrick Stokes, Salesforce president of applications and marketing, framed the deal around timing:
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.
Braze CEO and co-founder Bill Magnuson said the company’s technology was built around the belief that marketers and their creativity remain a competitive advantage.
BrazeAI is helping marketers get their best ideas live faster. Salesforce shares our commitment to marketers, and we’ll continue building as Braze.
Timeline
The transaction is expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal year 2028, pending approval from Braze shareholders and regulatory clearance.
This is Salesforce’s second AI marketing acquisition in recent months. The company announced it would acquire Listen Labs, an AI-powered customer research and human simulation platform, just last month.
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