When will the Salesforce and Cresta deal close?
Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to buy Cresta, a company whose voice agents handle complicated customer calls from beginning to end. The software giant announced the deal Monday. It expects the transaction to close in the first quarter of its fiscal year 2028, pending regulatory approvals.
How much is Salesforce paying for Cresta?
Salesforce did not say how much it will pay. A person familiar with the deal told The Information that the price is $2.7 billion. TNW has not independently verified that figure.
Cresta is nine years old. It started at Stanford University’s AI Lab, according to The Information, which described the purchase as a way to build up Salesforce’s customer service business.
What do Cresta's voice agents do?
Cresta describes itself as a voice-first operating system for customer experience. Its voice agents hold natural, real-time conversations and can handle interruptions, Salesforce said. Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines already use them at enterprise scale.
The same platform also works alongside human staff. It guides representatives during live calls, analyzes every interaction, coaches employees and tests the voice agents against the same quality standard applied to people.
“Voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers,” said Kishan Chetan, executive vice president and general manager of Agentforce and Service Cloud at Salesforce.
Salesforce plans to combine Cresta with Service Cloud. The goal is to tie each conversation to the customer’s history and to its outcome, which Salesforce measures as resolution, retention and revenue.
Cresta will continue to support the contact center and telephony platforms its customers use today, Salesforce said.
“Now, by uniting our platform with Salesforce, we will realize our full vision at scale, embedding real-time conversation intelligence and agentic experiences directly into Salesforce’s first-class customer service platform,” said Ping Wu, chief executive of Cresta.
The Cresta deal is the latest in a string of acquisitions for Salesforce. On October 20, the company agreed to a $5.7 billion deal for Braze. Days before announcing Cresta, it said it planned to buy Rune, a national security software company. In September, Salesforce closed its purchase of Fin.
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