Salesforce acquires voice agent leader Cresta

Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cresta, the voice-first operating system for CX and agent coaching. The details of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of fiscal year 2028, subject to customary closing conditions, including receipt of required regulatory approvals.

Cresta's agents, which are used by Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines, hold natural, real-time conversations and handle interruptions. At a time when organizations require natural language automation at scale, voice AI is emerging as a means by which to meet customers on the channel of their choice. Its software also coaches human agents, analyzing their interactions in real time.

"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'll bring the customer, the conversation and the outcome into one place." 

Prior to the acquisition Cresta raised $282 million from investors including Qatar Investment Authority, World Innovation Lab, Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz. 

In November 2025 Cresta held its first customer conference, Cresta Wave, during which it unveiled four product innovations: The Agent Operations Center, Automation Discovery, AI Agent Prompt Optimizer and Real-Time Translation and multilingual AI capabilities.

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Combining Salesforce and Cresta's capabilities 

While Cresta brings the expertise in voice agents, Salesforce has the necessary expertise in data utilization, allowing for deeper insights to be uncovered from customer interactions.

The press announcement states that together with Service Cloud, businesses will be able to connect "every conversation to the customer and the outcome it drives", whether that is resolution, retention or revenue. After the transaction closes, Cresta will "continue to support the leading contact center and telephony platforms its customers rely on today". 

Cresta CEO Ping Wu said: "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. Through unparalleled innovation, we've achieved that goal with some of the world's largest companies. Now, 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."

How Salesforce is changing the vendor landscape

Organizations like Salesforce, Genesys and Freshworks are acquiring start-ups, competitors and smaller solution providers at pace. 

On October 20, Salesforce agreed to acquire customer engagement platform Braze for US$5.66 billion, allowing it to combine Braze's expertise in turning live customer behavior into personalized engagement with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, CRM, and Data 360.

Its acquired capabilities aren't limited to customer experience and customer service.  days after the Braze deal was confirmed – and immediately prior to the Cresta deal – Salesforce announced its acquisition of Rune Technologies, broadening its Missionforce portfolio with solutions to enable critical logistics and sustainment operations for the US military and allied nations.

Salesforce isn't just snapping up smaller companies. It is also backing them. For example in September in participated in a Wonderful's Series C, which raised a total of $550 million. 

Quick links 

• Salesforce launches pay-per-resolution agent
• Claudeforce heralds "new era of enterprise AI"
• VIDEO: Cresta's VP of customer strategy explains why 76% of customer conversations are human + AI
• Where the AI vendor market is going, and what it means for CXOs