Salesforce wants a bigger piece of what happens when a customer picks up the phone. The company said Monday it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, a startup whose voice agents resolve complex customer calls end to end and whose software guides human representatives in real time.
Salesforce didn’t put a price on the deal. It expects the transaction to close in the first quarter of fiscal 2028, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions. Salesforce’s fiscal year starts Feb. 1, which puts that window between February and April 2027.
Cresta’s voice agents run at enterprise scale for Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines, Salesforce said, and they’re built to hold real-time conversations and handle interruptions. The same platform coaches live reps, tests and tunes the voice agents, and grades both against one quality standard. Salesforce plans to pair it with Service Cloud so that each call is tied to the customer record and to what came of it, whether that’s a fix, a saved account or a sale.
“Voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers,” said Kishan Chetan, EVP and GM of Agentforce and Service Cloud at Salesforce.
A second service-AI buy in two months
Cresta lands less than two months after Salesforce closed its purchase of Fin, the company formerly called Intercom, on Sept. 10. Salesforce said Fin’s customer agent works across live chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, voice and Slack for more than 30,000 companies and resolves 76% of queries on average. Cresta is built for the phone, which Salesforce called the place customers turn to for their highest-stakes issues.
For buyers, one line in the announcement may count for more than the strategy talk. After closing, Cresta will keep supporting the contact center and telephony platforms its customers already use, Salesforce said. A company running its phones on another vendor’s software wouldn’t have to move to keep the product.
Cresta CEO Ping Wu said the plan is to embed “real-time conversation intelligence and agentic experiences directly into Salesforce’s first-class customer service Platform.”
Eight deals since June
The deal adds to a long run of shopping. Salesforce’s own acquisitions page lists eight definitive agreements signed since the start of June: Contentful, m3ter, Fin, Listen Labs, Loops, Braze, Rune Technologies and Cresta. The Braze agreement on Oct. 20 carried about $5.66 billion in enterprise value. Rune followed nine days later. Salesforce has also been adding cost and safety controls for AI agents, including the budget caps and kill switch it put into Agent Fabric last week.
Cresta raised a $125 million Series D in November 2024. WiL (World Innovation Lab) and the Qatar Investment Authority led it, with Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital among the returning investors, and the round lifted its total funding above $270 million. At the time, Cresta said it had nearly quadrupled annual recurring revenue over the previous two years.