Salesforce is paying a reported $2.7 billion to buy Cresta, a startup that builds AI voice agents for customer-service call centres — one of the largest pure AI acquisitions of 2026 and the clearest sign yet that the tech giant is betting its future on talking machines rather than dashboards.
The company said it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, with the transaction expected to close in the first quarter of its fiscal 2028, subject to regulatory approvals. Salesforce did not publicly disclose the price, but a person familiar with the matter told the press the figure is $2.7 billion — roughly double Cresta’s last public valuation.
The $2.7 billion deal
Cresta builds a voice-first platform that resolves complex customer calls from start to finish, coaches human agents in real time while they are on the line, and analyses every conversation for insight. Once the deal closes, that technology will fold into Salesforce’s Service Cloud, giving its customer-relationship platform a dedicated voice layer for both service and sales calls.
The acquisition pairs Cresta’s voice technology with what Salesforce describes as the world’s most-used CRM, extending a deliberate shift the company has been signalling all year: embedding AI agents directly into customer-facing workflows rather than keeping automation in the back office.
Cresta was founded in 2017 as a project out of Stanford University’s AI lab by Sebastian Thrun — the computer scientist who pioneered several landmark AI projects at Google — alongside Tim Shi and Zayd Enam. The startup has raised more than $280 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global, and was valued at $1.6 billion after its 2022 Series C round.
What Cresta brings to Salesforce
The startup’s voice agents handle complex customer calls end to end, coach human representatives live during calls, and analyse every interaction. For Salesforce, the acquisition fills the one gap its Agentforce platform did not cover: a voice layer for live service and sales conversations.
“Uniting with Salesforce will” let Cresta’s platform reach the company’s enormous customer base, chief executive Ping Wu framed the tie-up, trading a coveted independent exit for distribution inside the world’s largest customer-service software ecosystem.
Salesforce’s AI buying spree
The Cresta deal caps an aggressive run of acquisitions at Salesforce through 2026. In September, the company completed its roughly $3.6 billion purchase of AI customer-service provider Fin, and it separately agreed to pay about $5.66 billion for marketing software firm Braze. Even a smaller Israeli startup, Loops, was picked up for an estimated $30 million to explain shifts in business metrics for Tableau.
Investors met the Cresta announcement with caution: Salesforce’s shares closed Monday’s trading at $226.18, down 1.3 per cent.
What happens next
Regulators still need to approve the deal, and the AI voice market is moving fast. Rivals including startups led by former Salesforce executives are racing to build their own voice agents, and Salesforce’s decision to buy rather than build signals that it believes the voice interface is too important — and moving too quickly — to develop in-house.
For everyone else on the call-centre floor, the message is simpler: the next time you phone customer support, the voice that answers may not be human at all.
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