Salesforce closes Fin and eyes $2bn Listen Labs, Business Insider reports

Salesforce completed its acquisition of Fin on Thursday, bringing the customer service AI company formerly known as Intercom into its business. The same week, Business Insider’s Katie Roof and Ben Bergman reported that Salesforce has held talks to buy a second AI startup, Listen Labs, for around $2bn.

Business Insider said the Listen Labs talks were not finalised and could still fail. Neither company responded to its requests for comment. TNW has not independently verified the report.

Fin is now part of Salesforce

Salesforce first agreed to buy Fin for $3.6bn in June. Its closing announcement says Fin brings more than 30,000 customer companies and its own AI models trained for customer service.

Fin’s agent answers customer queries across chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, voice and Slack. The company says it resolves 76% of queries on average without a human. Fin will sit inside Salesforce’s AI Labs and keep serving its existing customers.

“The #1 customer agent meets the #1 CRM,” said Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s chair and chief executive. Eoghan McCabe, Fin’s co-founder and chief executive, said joining Salesforce would let Fin reach far more businesses.

What Listen Labs does

Listen Labs automates customer research. Its AI writes survey questions, interviews people over audio or video, and turns the conversations into reports and slides. That work usually takes human market researchers weeks.

Alfred Wahlforss and Florian Jüngermann founded the company in 2023, after meeting at Harvard. Jüngermann was previously a national champion in competitive programming in Germany. Business Insider lists Microsoft, Anthropic, Google, Nestlé, Sweetgreen and Perplexity among its customers.

In January, Listen Labs announced a $69m Series B led by Ribbit Capital, at a valuation of $500m. A $2bn deal would be four times that price, eight months later.

A signed term sheet, left behind

The talks appear to have cost Listen Labs another deal. TechCrunch’s Marina Temkin reported that the startup had signed a term sheet for a $125m Series C at a $1.5bn valuation, led by Menlo Ventures. According to several people familiar with the matter, the round never closed. Listen Labs walked away. VCs told TechCrunch that backing out of a signed term sheet is unusual and poorly regarded in venture circles.

TechCrunch also reported that Listen Labs has about $30m in annualised revenue. That is roughly three times the revenue of its rival Simile, which raised $200m at a $2bn valuation in July. Simile predicts human behaviour with AI rather than interviewing real people.

The price is the sticking point. A $2bn deal would value Listen Labs at around 67 times its revenue. One person with experience negotiating exits to Salesforce told TechCrunch the company may decide that is too steep. If the talks collapse, several VCs expect Listen Labs to raise at $2bn or more.

Building around Agentforce

Both deals feed Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI agent platform. Fin handles service conversations. Listen Labs, according to Business Insider, would help Agentforce understand what customers think and suggest what they might buy.

Salesforce has been buying steadily. It agreed to acquire the Berlin-founded content platform Contentful in June, and billing startup m3ter the same month. In August, it made Anthropic’s Claude central to its products through its Claudeforce partnership.

The wider market is paying up too. Nvidia confirmed this month that it is buying Hugging Face for $12.93bn. Whether Salesforce will pay 67 times revenue for a customer research tool is the question the Listen Labs talks now have to answer.