Salesforce said on November 2, 2026 that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, a voice AI company that builds software agents to handle customer service phone calls. Cresta, founded in 2017, is based in Sunnyvale, California.
Salesforce did not disclose the terms. The Information reported that the deal is worth $2.7 billion, citing a person familiar with it, and Dealroom repeated that figure; Salesforce has not confirmed it. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of Salesforce's fiscal year 2028, which CMSWire noted runs from February to April 2027. It still needs regulatory approvals and must meet customary closing conditions.
Salesforce said that after the deal closes Cresta will keep supporting the contact center and telephony platforms its customers already use. Cresta's chief executive, Ping Wu, is quoted in the announcement, but the companies did not say what roles he or other Cresta staff will take inside Salesforce.
What Cresta built
Salesforce describes Cresta as a voice-first operating system for customer experience. Its voice agents are designed to resolve complex customer calls from start to finish without a human, while a second part of the platform listens to live calls handled by people and guides the representative in real time. The software also analyzes every interaction, giving managers a record of what happens across a contact center.
Salesforce named Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines as companies whose calls are handled by Cresta's agents.
The company has added products at a steady pace this year. According to its press page, Cresta launched Conductor, an agent for building AI agents, in June; a Deputy Agent that keeps working on a customer's case after the call ends in October; and, on October 29, an opening of its agent platform to developers with end-to-end self-service. It also announced partnerships with outsourcing firms TELUS Digital and Firstsource during 2026.
“Voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers,”
Why Salesforce is buying
Cresta will sit inside Agentforce and Service Cloud, the Salesforce business run by Kishan Chetan, its executive vice president and general manager. "Voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers," Chetan said in the announcement. He added that Cresta has built voice agents that handle complex, high-volume calls for some of the world's largest brands, and that by combining the two companies Salesforce would bring the customer, the conversation and the outcome into one place.
Wu said Cresta's mission has been to turn every customer interaction into a competitive advantage for its clients through a single agentic operating system for customer experience. "Now, by uniting our platform with Salesforce, we will realize our full vision at scale," he said, describing a plan to embed real-time conversation intelligence and agents directly in Salesforce's customer service platform.
Blair Pleasant, president and principal analyst at COMMfusion, told CMSWire that Cresta's ability to support existing contact center and telephony platforms was important.
The founders and the funding
Cresta was founded in 2017 by Zayd Enam, Sebastian Thrun and Tim Shi, according to the company. Besides its Sunnyvale headquarters it lists offices in Palo Alto, San Francisco, New York, Berlin and Toronto.
Its last reported round was a $125 million Series D announced on November 19, 2024 and co-led by World Innovation Lab (WiL) and the Qatar Investment Authority. Accenture, EnvisionX, LG Technology Ventures, Qualcomm and Workday Ventures joined as new investors, and Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, J.P. Morgan, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global returned. Cresta said the round took its total funding past $270 million, and that it would use the money to open engineering hubs in Romania and India. Dealroom lists total funding of $276 million.
Cresta's chief executive, Ping Wu, leads the company today. The announcement did not say how many people Cresta employs.
Salesforce's run of deals
Cresta is the latest in a string of Salesforce acquisitions this autumn. CMSWire described the company as being on a 2026 customer experience shopping spree. TechCrunch reported on October 30 that Salesforce, through its Missionforce defense unit, had agreed to buy Rune Technologies, a defense logistics software startup, in a deal reported at $375 million in cash and stock; Salesforce did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment on that price.
Salesforce's own pitch for the deal rests on voice. Chetan called it the channel where service is hardest to get right, and Cresta brings agents that already handle calls for large airline, hotel and cable customers. The agreement still needs regulatory approval before it closes next year.
