Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, a voice-first platform for customer experience. The deal brings AI voice agents into Service Cloud and gives Salesforce a direct stake in the phone calls where customers bring their most urgent problems.
What Salesforce is buying
Cresta describes itself as the voice-first operating system for customer experience. Its voice agents resolve complex customer calls end to end, hold natural conversations in real time and handle interruptions without losing the thread of the call.
The same platform coaches human representatives while they talk, tests and improves voice agents and analyzes every interaction. Salesforce says Cresta already runs those agents at enterprise scale for brands including Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines.
After the transaction closes, Cresta will continue to support the contact center and telephony platforms its customers already use. Salesforce is not forcing an immediate move to its own service stack.
Why the phone call matters
Voice is the channel where service is hardest to run well, because customers call when something important has gone wrong and expect an answer in the moment. Salesforce argues that text based agents and workflow tools alone cannot cover that ground.
Voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers.
Kishan Chetan, executive vice president and general manager of Agentforce and Service Cloud at Salesforce, said Cresta has built voice agents that handle complex, high-volume calls for some of the largest brands. Salesforce brings the customer history and the systems to act, while Cresta brings an understanding of every conversation.
A price Salesforce kept quiet
Salesforce did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. Reports put the price at about $2.7 billion, which would make Cresta one of the larger AI acquisitions of the year, although that figure is not confirmed by either company.
Cresta was founded in 2017 out of Stanford’s AI Lab by Sebastian Thrun, Tim Shi and Zayd Enam. The company says it has raised more than $270 million, including a $125 million Series D round in November 2024, and that it reached $100 million in recurring revenue in 2026.
A busy year of deals
Cresta is the latest in a run of Salesforce acquisitions aimed at the customer service stack. Salesforce closed its purchase of Fin, the company formerly known as Intercom, in September 2026 in a deal worth about $3.6 billion.
In October 2026 it agreed to acquire Braze, a customer engagement platform, for about $5.66 billion. Earlier in the year it also signed agreements for customer research startup Listen Labs, analytics startup Loops and content platform Contentful.
What happens next
The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of Salesforce’s fiscal year 2028, which runs from February to April 2027. The close is subject to customary closing conditions, including receipt of required regulatory approvals.
Now, by uniting our platform with Salesforce, we will realize our full vision at scale.
Ping Wu, chief executive of Cresta, said the combination will embed real-time conversation intelligence and agentic experiences directly into Salesforce’s customer service platform. For Salesforce, the test will be whether voice agents can resolve calls as reliably as its text agents already resolve chats.
