Salesforce to swallow rival Braze with $5.66bn deal

CRM giant Salesforce has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire leading customer engagement platform and bitter rival Braze in deal worth $5.66bn (£4.22bn), in a move which one commentator has claimed a “textbook example of a tech giant buying a troublesome competitor”.

Braze was launched in 2011 under its original name Appboy, focusing exclusively on mobile app engagement, push notifications, and in-app messaging. It set up its London office in 2016 and rebranded a year later to reflect the platform expanding past mobile apps to handle cross-channel customer engagement, including email and web.

Braze has a large physical presence in the UK, operating its EMEA headquarters out of a state-of-the-art office located at Exchange House near Liverpool Street Station in Central London.

The company helps marketers build deeper customer relationships by responding to customer behaviour in real time, coordinating personalised experiences across mobile apps, websites, email, SMS, WhatsApp, and more.

The business is optimised for high-volume, real-time B2C engagement, continuously updating customer profiles and adapting customer journeys while powering trillions of messages and journey actions each year. Its artificial intelligence tool, BrazeAI, extends these capabilities with AI-powered optimisation across content, offers, channels, and timing, helping marketers make each interaction more relevant.

Salesforce has been steadily growing over the past few years, but the pace of growth has changed dramatically. The company has moved from a hyper-growth tech giant delivering roughly 20% annual top-line increases to scaling at roughly 9% to 11% a year.

While some have argued that Salesforce was stagnating under the weight of market saturation, a shift in corporate strategy has kept the company expanding both its revenue and profitability.

The acquisition of Braze will certainly help. The company brings with it 2,790 customers, with 361 of those spending more than $500,000 a year. That total represents at 12% annual growth rate. UK clients include Virgin Media O2, Uswitch, and Motorway.

Braze chief executive and CEO Bill Magnuson said: “Braze was built on the conviction that marketers and their creativity are a brand’s ultimate competitive advantage. This past year we shipped at the fastest pace in our history, and BrazeAI is helping marketers get their best ideas live faster.

“Salesforce shares our commitment to marketers, and we’ll continue building as Braze and investing in the Braze community of customers and partners who built this company with us. Salesforce’s platform will help us innovate faster and together we’ll help marketers around the world build deeper, more lasting relationships with their customers.”

Following the close of the transaction, Braze’s real-time engagement and AI decisioning capabilities are expected to complement all four layers of Salesforce’s architecture; Data 360, Customer 360, Agentforce, and SIForce. Within Customer 360, Braze is expected to strengthen Marketing Cloud’s cross-channel personalisation, helping brands turn a deeper view of each customer into richer experiences, optimized in real time at the scale needed to reach hundreds of millions of people.

Salesforce president of applications and marketing Patrick Stokes commented: “Every interaction is an opportunity to wow your customers. Most of that wow comes from knowing your customer, and responding at just the right moment. Braze was built to turn live customer behaviour into personalised engagement at scale. Bringing that capability together with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, CRM, and Data 360 will deliver that wow moment in every customer interaction.”

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