Salesforce to buy marketing platform Braze for $5.7 billion

Key Points

1. Salesforce agreed Tuesday to acquire Braze for $5.66 billion in cash.
2. Braze holders get $47.50 per share, a 58% premium to Monday's close.
3. The deal marks Salesforce's return to large acquisitions after a 2023 pullback.

The latest:

Salesforce agreed on Tuesday to buy marketing platform Braze for $5.66 billion in cash, in what would rank as its fifth-largest acquisition. Braze stockholders will receive $47.50 per share, a 58% premium to the previous day’s closing price, according to Axios. The company went public in 2021 at $65 per share.

Details:

• The price: The all-cash deal values Braze at $5.66 billion, with shareholders receiving $47.50 per share. That is a 58% premium to where the stock closed the previous day, according to Axios — a sizable markup even by software M&A standards, and a signal of how contested the asset was.
• The IPO gap: Braze listed publicly in 2021 at $65 per share. The agreed takeout price of $47.50 sits well below that debut level, meaning investors who bought at the offering are being taken out at a discount to their entry point despite the premium to the recent trading price.
• The ranking: Axios reported the transaction would be Salesforce’s fifth-largest acquisition to date. The company’s earlier mega-deals include MuleSoft, Tableau and Slack, the trio whose integration difficulties shaped its dealmaking posture in recent years.
• The reversal: Salesforce dissolved its board M&A committee in 2023, partly because of how hard it proved to absorb those three mega-deals, according to Axios. Tuesday’s agreement, coming after a run of multibillion-dollar purchases, places the company a long way from that retrenchment.
• The buying spree: Salesforce has already paid multiple billions this year for Listen Labs and Fin, Axios reported. That follows last year’s $8 billion acquisition of Informatica, the largest of the recent cluster and a marker of how quickly the company reopened its checkbook.
• The product logic: Axios framed the purchase as an admission that Salesforce’s marketing cloud needed seeding. Braze sells customer-engagement and marketing software, placing it directly in the product category where Salesforce’s own offering has lagged.
• The disclosure gap: The announcement did not include a closing date, regulatory timeline, or terms for how Braze’s business and workforce would be folded into Salesforce’s existing marketing operations.

Background:

Salesforce built much of its product range through acquisition, buying MuleSoft, Tableau and Slack in successive multibillion-dollar deals. Integration strain from that run led the company to wind down its board-level M&A committee in 2023, slowing large purchases before the recent wave resumed.

Between the lines:

Axios read the deal as a build-versus-buy decision, and the pattern supports it: a 2023 M&A pullback has given way to Informatica at $8 billion, Listen Labs, Fin, and now Braze. The target sits in marketing software, the same category Salesforce’s own cloud has underperformed in — suggesting the company judged purchasing a competitor faster than closing the product gap internally.

What’s next

Watch for a disclosed closing timeline, antitrust review of a deal combining two marketing-software vendors, and Braze shareholder approval of the $47.50 per-share price given it sits below the 2021 IPO level.