Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, the voice-first operating system for customer experience, the company announced on Monday. The deal, which the Information reported at about $2.7 billion, continues Salesforce’s aggressive 2026 buying spree in AI-powered customer service.

Call center agent with headset at work
Call center agents are Cresta’s core market. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

What Was Announced?

Salesforce said Cresta’s voice agents resolve complex customer calls from start to finish while its platform coaches human representatives in real time and analyzes every interaction. Cresta’s agents run at enterprise scale for brands including Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines, handling natural, real-time conversations and interruptions.

After the transaction closes, Cresta will continue to support the leading contact center and telephony platforms its customers rely on today. Salesforce expects the deal to close in the first quarter of fiscal 2028, between February and April 2027, subject to regulatory approvals and customary conditions.

“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. “Cresta has built voice agents that handle complex, high-volume calls for some of the world’s largest brands. As more service is resolved in the conversation itself, together we will bring the customer, the conversation and the outcome into one place.”

“Cresta’s mission is to turn every customer interaction into a competitive advantage for our customers through a single agentic operating system for customer experience,” said Ping Wu, CEO of Cresta. “By uniting our platform with Salesforce, we will realize our full vision at scale, embedding real-time conversation intelligence and agentic experiences directly into Salesforce’s first-class customer service platform.”

An $8th Deal in Five Months

Cresta is the latest in a remarkable run of Salesforce acquisitions in 2026. The company’s own acquisitions page now lists eight definitive agreements signed since June: Contentful (reported ~$1.5 billion), Fin (formerly Intercom, ~$3.6 billion), Listen Labs (reported ~$2 billion), Loops, Braze (~$5.66 billion in enterprise value), Rune Technologies (~$375 million), and Cresta. In October alone, Salesforce struck deals for Braze and Loops, nine days apart.

Cresta lands less than two months after Salesforce closed its purchase of Fin on September 10, doubling down on AI agents for customer service. Together with Service Cloud, Salesforce says businesses will be able to connect every conversation to the customer and to the outcome it drives: resolution, retention and revenue.

About Cresta

Founded in 2017 by Stanford AI lab veteran Sebastian Thrun alongside Tim Shi and Zayd Enam, Cresta raised a $125 million Series D in November 2024 led by the World Innovation Lab and the Qatar Investment Authority, with Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock and Sequoia participating. That round pushed total funding above $270 million and came two years after a 2022 Series C that valued the company at $1.6 billion.

The reported $2.7 billion price tag would give Cresta’s investors a meaningful markup and reflects how highly voice AI is being valued as enterprises rush to automate phone support, one of the most expensive channels in customer service.

Why It Matters

Salesforce is assembling the pieces of an agentic customer-service stack at a blistering pace, spending more than $12 billion in disclosed 2026 deals alone, before Cresta. Voice remains the highest-stakes channel in support: customers call when chatbots fail. By adding Cresta’s voice agents and real-time rep coaching to Service Cloud and Agentforce, Salesforce is betting that the phone call, not just the chat window, becomes the next frontier of AI agents.

Salesforce x Cresta deal facts

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