After years touting Salesforce’s in-house AI development, CEO Marc Benioff is happy to look elsewhere for technology to boost its platform, and this week spent a reported $2 billion on AI customer research startup Listen Labs.
Salesforce announced Tuesday that it had signed a deal to acquire the US AI research and human simulation platform, which was last valued at more than $500 million after a $69 million Series B round in January.
AI Labs President Aman Naimat said Listen Labs had “reimagined” market research “with AI agents that can conduct meaningful research and uncover context behind customer and user feedback. We look forward to expanding access to these agentic capabilities through Salesforce.”
The deal comes a few weeks after Business Insider first reported that the SaaS company was negotiating a $2 billion deal with the three-year-old startup, and a month after it launched “Claudeforce” with Anthropic.
