Credit: Salesforce
Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to buy Cresta, whose voice agents handle complex customer calls from start to finish, Salesforce said on Monday. The deal should close in the first quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2028, subject to regulatory approvals.
Salesforce did not disclose a price. It agreed to pay $2.7bn, according to a person familiar with the deal, as Valida Pau and Kevin McLaughlin reported for The Information. TNW has not independently verified the figure.
Cresta is nine years old and started out at Stanford University’s AI Lab, The Information reported. The deal builds up Salesforce’s customer service business, the outlet wrote.
Voice agents and human coaching
Cresta calls itself a voice-first operating system for customer experience. Its voice agents hold natural, real-time conversations and handle interruptions, Salesforce said. Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines use them at enterprise scale.
The same platform guides human representatives during live calls and analyses every interaction. It also coaches staff and tests the voice agents, holding both to the same quality standard.
“Voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers,” said Kishan Chetan, EVP and GM of Agentforce and Service Cloud at Salesforce.
Salesforce plans to join Cresta with Service Cloud, its customer service software. The aim is to link each conversation to the customer’s history and to the outcome, which Salesforce lists as resolution, retention and revenue.
After the deal closes, Cresta will keep supporting the contact centre 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.
A run of deals
Cresta follows other recent Salesforce deals. It agreed a $5.7bn Braze deal on 20 October. Days before Cresta, it announced plans to buy Rune, a national security software company.
In September, Salesforce closed its Fin purchase.
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