Salesforce to Acquire Braze for $5.66 Billion

Salesforce plans to acquire Braze, a customer engagement platform provider, for approximately $5.66 billion.

Braze helps marketers build deeper customer relationships by responding to customer behavior in real time, coordinating personalized experiences across mobile apps, websites, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and more. Its cloud-native, event-streaming architecture is optimized for high-volume, real-time B2C engagement, continuously updating customer profiles and adapting customer journeys while powering trillions of messages and journey actions each year. BrazeAI extends these capabilities with AI-powered optimization across content, offers, channels, and timing, helping marketers make each interaction more relevant.

"Every interaction is an opportunity to wow your customers," said Patrick Stokes, president of applications and marketing at Salesforce, in a statement. "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."

"Braze was built on the conviction that marketers and their creativity are a brand's ultimate competitive advantage," said Bill Magnuson, CEO and co-founder of Braze, in a statement. "This past year we shipped at the fastest pace in our history, and BrazeAI is helping marketers get their best ideas live 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. 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."

Braze's real-time engagement and AI decisioning capabilities are expected to complement Salesforce's Data 360, Customer 360, Agentforce, and SIForce. Within Customer 360, Braze is expected to strengthen Marketing Cloud's cross-channel personalization, helping companies turn a deeper view of each customer into richer experiences, optimized in real time at scale.

Together, Salesforce and Braze would help businesses do the following:

• Act on customer behavior in real time. Braze's event-streaming architecture turns live customer signals and data from cloud data warehouses and other platforms into personalized messages and coordinated journeys, helping marketers adapt engagement as customers browse, buy, and use products.
• Deliver richer experiences across channels. Braze's deep mobile and app capabilities, including in-app messages, personalized content feeds, and live updates, work alongside email, web, and messaging channels to create more connected customer experiences.
• Make personalization more intelligent. Braze's AI decisioning helps marketers optimize content, offers, channels, and timing. Bringing these capabilities together with Salesforce’s customer context and Agentforce would help businesses make engagement more relevant and connect marketing with the broader customer relationship across commerce, sales, and service.

For the larger CRM industry, the deal is more significant than just another case of market consolidation.

Pini Yakuel, CEO of Optimove, says it "underscores how central CRM marketing has become to building customer loyalty and driving ROI.

"I'm also more certain than ever about where marketing platforms are heading. Most of the work marketers do will happen through agents, in conversation, inside the platform or in tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Journey builders become what you open to fine-tune. In that world, creating content is the easy part. The hard part is deciding, for every single customer, what to send and what to hold back. That’s a decisioning problem, and solving it is what will separate the brands that build loyalty from the ones that wear it out," he concluded.