Salesforce bets $5.66B on Braze to sharpen Marketing Cloud

Salesforce said Tuesday it plans to buy Braze, a customer engagement platform, in a deal valued at approximately $5.66 billion.

Under the terms of the deal, Braze shareholders would get $47.50 per share. Pending shareholder and regulatory approval, the acquisition is set to close sometime in Salesforce's fiscal 2028, which runs from February 1, 2027, through January 31, 2028.

Braze is neither a customer data platform (CDP) nor strictly an AI campaign builder, but there are strong elements of both in its Braze Data Platform and BrazeAI feature sets. Salesforce's platform already has a full CDP and has some AI marketing generation features.

In an interview earlier this year, Braze CEO Bill Magnuson framed his company's technology as a boon for marketers in a "post-SERP," agentic commerce era where agents are doing the searching, sourcing and buying. Yet he also predicted that people will buy things on the web manually for some time to come -- but with the aid of AI search.

That calls for a marketing stack that can support both types of online purchasing and drive brand loyalty despite AI remixing the underlying processes.

At the same time, marketers face tighter budgets and higher expectations, Magnuson said.

"You need to be able to harness the productivity-enhancing capabilities of AI and be able to evolve the ways that you're working to be able to have the assistance of agentic capability, more advanced reasoning and everything else," Magnuson explained. "Also, generative content is helping people do more [and] driving higher levels of performance."

Marketing Cloud gets much-needed glow-up

Salesforce's marketing automation portfolio, built through acquisitions including ExactTarget, Demandware, Datorama and Pardot -- and several smaller startups -- has accumulated overlapping products and names. Salesforce introduced Marketing Cloud Growth for SMBs in 2024, followed by Marketing Cloud Next in 2025 and the Agentforce Marketing branding. At Dreamforce this year, Salesforce again emphasized the Marketing Cloud name, although both Marketing Cloud Next and Agentforce Marketing remain in use.

Braze brings something to Marketing Cloud that the name changes can't: updated marketing automation tech that responds to customer triggers and events such as shopping cart activity, birthdays, email signups and website inquiries. Braze would bring more pinpoint monitoring of many channels -- web, text, mobile apps, voice, to name a few -- and orchestration that can switch between them.

The technology can, in theory, personalize marketing to individual customers. It would also make Salesforce more competitive in a market being reshaped by rapidly evolving AI advancements, said Predrag Jakovljevic, an analyst at Technology Evaluation Centers.

Braze adds modern real-time architecture into Salesforce's Marketing Cloud following that cloud's softer revenue performance in prior quarters.

"I don't think Salesforce has been known as the marketing-cloud leader compared to Adobe and Oracle, or even HubSpot in SMB," Jakovljevic said. "Braze adds modern real-time architecture into Salesforce's Marketing Cloud following that cloud's softer revenue performance in prior quarters."

Alex Torgerson, head of M&A at global consultancy West Monroe, sees it as more of an AI infrastructure deal, along the lines of previous acquisitions Informatica and Fin.

"It's the clearest signal yet that corporate buyers see owning the full stack of data, decisioning, and delivery as the way to win the AI-agent race," Torgerson said. "The strategic logic is sound, but the value hinges entirely on integration…and customer migration."

Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with over 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? Email him.