Salesforce to buy Braze for $5.66B: a 58% premium, but below Braze's 2021 IPO price
What's the deal? Salesforce has agreed to acquire customer engagement platform Braze for about $5.66 billion in enterprise value, the companies announced on October 20, 2026. Braze Class A shareholders will receive $47.50 in cash per share, a roughly 58% premium to Monday's close of $30.04, according to The Wall Street Journal. Braze shares jumped about 50% in premarket trading, while Salesforce slipped around 1%, CNBC reported.
The twist: Despite the premium, the price is well below the $65 a share at which Braze went public in 2021, Axios noted, a reminder of how far many of that year's software IPOs have fallen.
What does Braze do? New York-based Braze, led by co-founders Bill Magnuson and Jon Hyman, runs a cloud-native, event-streaming platform that turns live customer behavior into personalised messages across mobile apps, websites, email, SMS and WhatsApp. It powers trillions of messages and journey actions a year for about 2,770 customers, including Canva, Instacart, Urban OutfittersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and VenmoDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
Why Salesforce wants it: Salesforce plans to plug Braze into Marketing Cloud, Data 360, Customer 360 and its Agentforce AI-agent platform. "Braze was built to turn live customer behavior into personalized engagement at scale," said Patrick Stokes, Salesforce's president of applications and marketing. Axios called the deal an admission that Salesforce's marketing cloud "could use some seeding."
The bigger picture: Salesforce dissolved its board M&A committee in 2023 after struggling to digest MuleSoft, Tableau and Slack. It is now buying again at pace: its roughly $8 billion Informatica deal closed in November 2025, and this year it has agreed multi-billion-dollar deals for Listen Labs and AI customer-service agent FinDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → (about $3.6 billion). Braze would be its fifth-largest acquisition, per Axios.
What's next? The deal is expected to close in Salesforce's fiscal 2028, which starts in February 2027, subject to a Braze shareholder vote and antitrust approvals. Salesforce would owe Braze a $300 million fee if regulators block the deal, while Braze would pay $191.4 million in certain cases, such as accepting a rival offer, according to Braze's SEC filing. Salesforce said its fiscal 2027 guidance is unchanged.
The signal: The AI agent race is pushing the big application vendors to own every layer from customer data to the message that reaches the customer, and public SaaS companies trading below their IPO prices are the obvious shopping list.
Read more: Salesforce press release, CNBC, Axios, The Wall Street Journal
Image: Salesforce
