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Salesforce Pays 2.7 Billion Dollars for Cresta in Its Second AI Contact-Center Acquisition This Fall

Business · By: AIReport Admin · 1 hour ago · 👁 10
Salesforce Pays 2.7 Billion Dollars for Cresta in Its Second AI Contact-Center Acquisition This Fall

Salesforce has agreed to pay about 2.7 billion dollars for Cresta, the Stanford AI Lab spinout behind AI-powered contact center automation, according to people familiar with the deal. It is Salesforce's second major customer-service AI acquisition this fall, after closing a 3.6 billion dollar purchase of Fin in September, as the software giant races to keep up with AI-native rivals like Bret Taylor's Sierra.

Salesforce has agreed to acquire Cresta, a nine-year-old provider of AI-powered contact center automation software, for roughly 2.7 billion dollars, according to people familiar with the transaction. The company has not publicly confirmed the price, and spokespeople for both sides did not respond to requests for comment before publication.

The deal, first reported by The Information and corroborated by Chinese financial newswires on Tuesday, extends an unusually aggressive acquisition run for the enterprise software giant. In September, Salesforce closed its roughly 3.6 billion dollar purchase of Fin, another AI customer-service vendor, and it bought military-logistics AI startup Rune Technologies earlier this year.

At stake is one of the most contested corners of enterprise AI: the contact center. AI-native startups such as Sierra, founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, have been selling conversational agents that resolve customer issues end to end, putting direct pressure on the legacy customer-service software business that Salesforce helped define.

Cresta began life as a project inside Stanford University's AI Lab and was founded in 2017 by computer scientist Sebastian Thrun, who pioneered several AI efforts at Google, together with Tim Shi and Zayd Enam. Its software sits alongside human agents, suggesting responses, coaching reps in real time and increasingly automating conversations outright.

The company was valued at 1.6 billion dollars after its Series C round in 2022, and has raised more than 280 million dollars from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global, according to PitchBook data. Its most recent private valuation is not known.

For Salesforce, the logic is defensive as much as offensive: rather than let AI-native challengers disintermediate its service cloud franchise, it is buying the technology and teams building it. Cresta's coaching-and-automation stack also gives Salesforce a bridge product during the years when most enterprises will run mixed human-plus-agent workforces.

The open question is whether consolidation can match the pace of the attackers. Sierra and peers are growing quickly without legacy contracts to protect, and Salesforce is now betting that two multibillion-dollar acquisitions inside two months can close that gap faster than organic development alone.

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