38 billion yuan, the 100-billion-yuan SaaS giant has announced an acquisition.

News from Zhidongxi on October 21: Yesterday, enterprise SaaS giant Salesforce announced that it plans to acquire AI marketing and customer engagement platform Braze for an enterprise value of approximately 5.66 billion US dollars (equivalent to about 38.035 billion yuan). According to the transaction agreement, Class A common stockholders of Braze will receive 47.50 US dollars per share (equivalent to about 319.20 yuan) in cash.

This acquisition aims to enhance Salesforce's capabilities in real-time customer engagement and personalized marketing.

As enterprises begin to adopt AI Agents for marketing and customer service, Salesforce hopes to combine Braze's real-time customer behavior analysis and cross-channel marketing capabilities with its own customer relationship management system and enterprise AI application development platform Agentforce, to help enterprises adjust marketing content, reach channels and delivery timing based on customers' real-time behaviors.

On August 26 this year, Salesforce further deepened its cooperation with Anthropic and launched Claudeforce, which combines Claude's reasoning capabilities with Salesforce's enterprise data, workflows and business rules to promote the application of AI Agents in enterprise business.

▲ On August 26, 2026, Salesforce announced the deepening of cooperation with Anthropic. Source: Salesforce. This acquisition of Braze will further improve Salesforce's AI product layout for enterprise customers.

01.

From Appboy to Braze

AI Real-time Engagement Capability Makes Up for Marketing Shortcomings

Braze was co-founded in 2011 by Bill Magnuson (Co-founder and CEO), Jon Hyman (Co-founder and CTO) and Mark Ghermezian (Co-founder). It was originally named Appboy and was renamed Braze in 2017.

Magnuson once worked at Google and hedge fund Bridgewater Associates; Hyman graduated from Harvard University and served as Chief Engineer of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates; Ghermezian once founded indoor advertising company Flush Media, and served as Braze's early CEO and Executive Chairman.

▲ The three co-founders of Braze, Bill Magnuson, Jon Hyman and Mark Ghermezian. Source: Braze

Before the rise of generative AI, Braze mainly provided cross-channel customer engagement and marketing automation services, helping enterprises reach customers through push notifications, emails, SMS and in-app messages, and adjust marketing campaigns according to user behaviors.

Braze has gradually applied machine learning to marketing automation since 2014, and began to introduce generative AI into its products in 2022 for marketing copywriting and image generation. Now, its product BrazeAI further uses AI to optimize marketing content, preferential schemes, reach channels and delivery timing.

Technical architecture is the foundation for Braze to realize real-time customer engagement. Its cloud-native event streaming architecture can continuously update customer profiles, and adjust customer engagement processes according to user behaviors such as browsing, purchasing and using products.

Braze's official website states that its customer engagement platform processed 4.5 trillion messages and other Canvas operations in 2025, and completed 10.2 trillion API calls.

According to Braze's 2026 fiscal year performance announcement, the company's revenue in that year was about 738 million US dollars (equivalent to about 4.963 billion yuan), a year-on-year increase of 24.4%; but its GAAP operating loss was about 145 million US dollars (equivalent to about 973 million yuan).

Patrick Stokes, President of Salesforce Applications & Marketing Business, said that Braze can translate real-time customer behaviors into large-scale personalized interactions.

After the transaction is completed, Salesforce plans to integrate Braze's personalized engagement capabilities with Marketing Cloud, customer relationship management system CRM and data platform Data 360, to help enterprises respond to customer needs more timely.

Bill Magnuson, Co-founder and CEO of Braze, said that in the past year, Braze launched new products at the fastest pace in the company's history, and BrazeAI is also helping marketers turn ideas into actual marketing campaigns faster. He believes that Salesforce's platform will help Braze accelerate innovation and further serve customers and partners.

According to Salesforce's announcement, Braze currently serves about 2770 customers, including online design platform Canva, fast food chain brand Dairy Queen, fitness and wellness lifestyle brand Equinox, fresh grocery delivery platform Instacart, fashion retail brand Urban Outfitters and mobile payment service Venmo and other enterprises.

If the transaction is successfully approved by Braze's shareholders and passes the relevant regulatory review, it is expected to be completed in Salesforce's 2028 fiscal year.

After the acquisition news was announced, Braze's stock price closed at 45.57 US dollars (equivalent to about 306.23 yuan) on October 20, with an increase of 51.70% on that day; while Salesforce's stock price closed at 242.43 US dollars (equivalent to about 1629.20 yuan), which was basically flat on that day.

▲ On October 20, 2026, Braze's stock price closed at 45.57 US dollars, up 51.70% on the day. Source: Yahoo Finance

▲ On October 20, 2026, Salesforce's stock price closed at 242.43 US dollars, which was basically flat on the day. Source: Yahoo Finance

From the perspective of capital market reaction, the cash acquisition price of 47.50 US dollars per share (equivalent to about 319.20 yuan) proposed by Salesforce has a premium of about 58.1% compared with Braze's closing price of 30.04 US dollars on the previous trading day (October 19).

Salesforce said that this transaction will not change its performance guidance for fiscal year 2027, and there is no adjustment to long-term targets at present.

02.

From Model Access to Task Execution

Salesforce Steps up Efforts in Enterprise-level AI

Salesforce's acquisition of Braze is part of its promotion of the transformation of enterprise software to AI-driven workflows. The company hopes to connect customer data, business rules, AI models and execution tools, so that AI can not only analyze information, but also perform specific tasks after obtaining enterprise authorization.

On August 26, 2026, Salesforce further deepened its cooperation with Anthropic.

This cooperation launched the Salesforce in Claude plugin, with built-in 37 sales skills, which can help salespeople prepare for customer meetings, evaluate transaction progress and check sales pipelines.

Users can directly call Salesforce business information and perform related operations in Claude, and the specific operations still need to comply with Salesforce's existing permission settings and business rules.

Dario Amodei, Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, said that Salesforce in Claude can bring Claude into the business systems where a large number of commercial activities actually take place, helping enterprises to carry out work by using long-term accumulated customer information and business context.

In addition to Salesforce in Claude, the two sides also mentioned in the announcement that Claude can be used as the reasoning model of Agentforce and applied to products such as Agentforce Vibes and Agentforce Coworker.

The two sides are also exploring to use Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Cloud's AI development and deployment platform, to provide enterprise-level application solutions for the Claude model, enabling enterprises to use Claude in specific business scenarios while meeting data protection requirements.

The cooperation between Salesforce and Anthropic did not start this year.

On October 14, 2025, the two sides announced that they had reached a strategic cooperation, planning to connect Claude to Salesforce's enterprise-level AI application development platform Agentforce to provide AI capabilities for the fields of financial services, network security and life sciences.

▲ On October 14, 2025, Anthropic announced the deepening of cooperation with Salesforce. Source: Anthropic

On the same day, Salesforce also announced the deepening of strategic cooperation with OpenAI, promoting the connection between ChatGPT and Salesforce's enterprise business systems, and exploring to access OpenAI's model capabilities to the enterprise AI application development platform Agentforce 360.

▲ On October 14, 2025, Salesforce announced the deepening of cooperation with OpenAI. Source: Salesforce

03.

Conclusion: From Customer Engagement to Business Execution

Competition in Enterprise Software Escalates

Salesforce's previous cooperation with OpenAI and Anthropic has introduced the capabilities of different models into the enterprise software ecosystem. This acquisition of Braze further complements its capabilities in real-time customer engagement and personalized marketing.

As AI gradually enters the actual business process, the competition of enterprise software is extending from providing data query and content generation tools to understanding business context, calling enterprise data and executing specific tasks.

For Salesforce, the acquisition of Braze is not only a supplement to the capabilities of marketing products, but also a competition for the entry of enterprise AI applications. How to combine customer data, marketing capabilities and Agent's task execution capabilities will become the key to its subsequent integration.

Source: Salesforce

This article is from the WeChat official account "Zhidongxi", author: Huang Fei, editor: Jiang Yu, published by 36Kr with authorization.