Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Braze, a customer engagement platform, in a deal valued at approximately $5.66 billion in enterprise value.
Braze shareholders will receive $47.50 per share in cash, a premium of roughly 58% over the company's closing price of $30.04 on October 19, though still below the $65 per share at which Braze went public in 2021.
Braze's cloud-native, event-streaming architecture powers real-time personalisation across mobile apps, websites, email, SMS and WhatsApp, processing trillions of messages and journey actions annually, and serves approximately 2,770 customers including Canva, Instacart and Venmo.
Data layer strengthened
Salesforce said the acquisition will strengthen all four layers of its architecture, Data 360, Customer 360, Agentforce and SIForce, with Braze expected to reinforce Marketing Cloud's cross-channel personalization; Patrick Stokes, Salesforce's President of Applications and Marketing, said "most of that wow comes from knowing your customer, and responding at just the right moment," while Braze co-founder Bill Magnuson said the company would "continue building as Braze" under Salesforce's platform.
The deal arrives as Salesforce returns to larger-scale acquisitions after a period of investor focus on profitability, targeting a marketing segment that has underperformed other application areas in recent quarters.
Salesforce has agreed to pay a $300 million termination fee under specified circumstances, while Braze would owe $191.4 million if it abandons the agreement.
The transaction requires Braze shareholder approval and regulatory clearances, and is expected to close in Salesforce's fiscal year 2028, with no anticipated change to its fiscal 2027 guidance.
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