The Selloff Didn’t Stop Salesforce From Spending $2.7 Billion on an AI Startup
Salesforce signed its fifth major acquisition of the year while its stock sits 14% in the red, raising a question every investor in the sector now has to answer: how many integrations can one platform absorb before the buying spree…
On November 2, 2026, Salesforce (NYSE:CRM | CRM Price Prediction) said it signed a definitive agreement to buy Cresta. Cresta is a private company whose voice agents handle complex customer calls from start to finish, and its software also trains human reps. Salesforce did not disclose a price, but it is reportedly paying $2.7 billion.
The stock fell 1.32% and closed at $226.18, a market value of $186.12 billion. It traded at $225.41 after hours. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (NYSEARCA:IGV) dropped 2.29% to $101.90, well below its $116.32 52-week high, so Salesforce’s decline matched the rest of the sector.
Selling resumed on October 29. That day ServiceNow (NYSE:NOW) fell 26.95% to $109.67 after giving a weaker contracted revenue outlook, and Salesforce fell 4.63% to $230.90. Salesforce now stands 9.63% below its October 22 close of $250.29 and is down 14.03% for the year.
It is still about 51% above its June 22 closing low of $150.12 and about 16% below its $269.11 high. A third deal in two weeks likely adds integration work faster than it improves the product.
What Salesforce Signed and What It Left Out
The signed agreement covers a narrow scope. Cresta will be combined with Service Cloud and will keep working with the contact center and telephony systems its customers already use, which tells you Salesforce wants to own the AI layer of the call without owning the phone system under it.
The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of fiscal 2028, which runs roughly February through April 2027, if regulators approve. No money has changed hands yet. Salesforce did not disclose the price. It also did not say whether it will pay in cash or stock, how much revenue Cresta will add, or what the deal will do to margins and earnings.
Kishan Chetan runs Agentforce and Service Cloud. He said, “Voice is where service is hardest to get right, and where it matters most to customers.” Phone calls are where the hardest problems and the highest labor costs end up. An agent that can finish a call on its own is worth more than one that only drafts replies.
Sizing the Reported Price
On April 30, 2026, Cresta said it had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, a figure that has not been audited. Its last stated valuation was $1.6 billion, set after an $80 million Series C led by Tiger Global in March 2022. A $125 million Series D in November 2024 came with no valuation.
The reported price is roughly 69% above that 2022 valuation and at most about 27 times recurring revenue. That is a high multiple for revenue no auditor has checked. For Salesforce, though, the deal equals only about 1.45% of its market value.
A more useful comparison is the $25 billion accelerated share repurchase, an agreement in which a bank hands over shares up front. Salesforce expects it to retire at least 14% of its shares at an average of $176. The day after those results, the stock rose 22.6% from $205.62 to $252.05.
Why the Deal Pattern Matters More
This year Salesforce also agreed to buy Contentful at a reported $1.5 billion, Fin (formerly Intercom) for about $3.6 billion, Listen Labs for about $2 billion, and Braze (NASDAQ:BRZE) at an enterprise value of about $5.66 billion. Including Cresta, the five deals total about $15.5 billion, although several prices are reported rather than confirmed. Salesforce gave no price for m3ter, Loops, or Rune Technologies.
Salesforce keeps buying features instead of building them, and each purchase adds code that must be joined into a single product. It is doing this while Informatica is still being integrated.
Blair Pleasant of COMMfusion summed up the logic. “Cresta understands the conversation, Salesforce understands the customer.” That logic holds only if the two come as one product that contact centers will buy.
What Salesforce’s Valuation Signals for Investors Now
With a P/E of about 25 and a free cash flow yield of 7.74%, the stock is reasonably priced for a company whose Agentforce annual recurring revenue topped $1.5 billion, up more than 240%.
Salesforce’s current remaining performance obligation, meaning contracted revenue due within a year, grew 14% last quarter. That growth suggests ServiceNow’s weaker outlook likely reflects issues specific to ServiceNow.
The real risk is execution, because Salesforce has signed eight acquisitions in one year. The next earnings report, expected around December 2, 2026, but not yet confirmed, should say something specific about voice in Service Cloud. A filing should eventually disclose Cresta’s terms, and the deal should close by April 2027. If the stock closes below $205.62, the August rally will have fully reversed, and the valuation case would need a fresh look.
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Omor Ibne Ehsan is a writer at 24/7 Wall St. He is a self-taught investor with a focus on growth, cyclical, and dividend equities that have strong fundamentals, value, and long-term potential. He also has an interest in high-risk, high-reward investments such as penny stocks.
