Five9 has agreed to acquire Level AI, an AI-native platform for customer experience, in an all-cash deal worth about $325 million. The agreement was announced on November 5, and it pairs Five9’s cloud contact center platform with Level AI’s AI agents and conversation models.
Level AI builds AI for customer experience teams. Its platform covers AI agents for voice and digital channels, Agent Assist, quality management, Voice of the Customer, coaching, and AI Workers. It handles more than one billion customer interactions a year for enterprise teams.
What Level AI brings
The platform runs on Level AI Latitude, the company’s own family of AI models built for customer conversations. Level AI says Latitude delivers up to 49x lower cost and 4x lower latency than frontier models, and it gives enterprises direct control over data privacy.
Level AI serves enterprise customers including Gusto, Chime, Empyrean, and VistaPrint. The startup was founded by Ashish Nagar, a former product leader on Amazon’s Alexa team, and it is backed by Adams Street Partners, Battery Ventures, and Eniac Ventures.
“We built Level AI so every customer conversation makes the next one better, for customers and for the people who serve them,” said Ashish Nagar, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Level AI.
Two ways to buy it
Five9 will sell Level AI’s applications as standalone products for companies that are not ready to move their contact centers to the cloud. The same tools will also sit inside the AI application layer of the Five9 Genius CX Platform, so existing Five9 customers can adopt them without changing platforms.
The two companies have worked together since 2022, and Level AI’s tools are already available through the Five9 CX Marketplace. Five9 serves more than 4,000 customers across 140-plus countries, which gives Level AI a much larger audience for its products.
“Our vision for the future of CX is one where AI and human agents work as a coordinated system, each making the other better,” said Amit Mathradas, Chief Executive Officer at Five9.
The deal is the latest in a run of contact center AI deals. Salesforce moved into voice AI with its acquisition of Cresta earlier in November.
The price drew a cold market reaction
Five9’s board unanimously approved the agreement, and the company will pay for Level AI from its balance sheet. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions.
The price amounts to almost half of Five9’s cash and marketable investments, which stood at $738 million at the end of the third quarter. Five9 shares fell more than 23 percent in late trading after the deal was announced.
Five9 also reported its third quarter results on the same day. Revenue rose 13 percent from a year earlier to $323.3 million, while subscription revenue grew 16 percent. Adjusted earnings of 82 cents per share beat Wall Street’s expectation of 80 cents.
Full-year guidance excludes any contribution from the pending deal. For the current quarter, Five9 expects earnings of 88 to 92 cents per share on sales of $328 million to $334 million, below the 99 cents and $330.7 million Wall Street expected.
What happens next
The transaction is expected to close in 2026, and the two companies will operate separately until then. Level AI said there are no immediate changes to contracts, invoices, or support contacts, and it will flag any change in advance.
