Salesforce Eyes Zoomin Purchase To Bring AI Agents More Data

‘Proprietary unstructured data is powerful fuel our customers can use for AI agents,’ says Salesforce executive Rahul Auradkar.

Customer relationship management software vendor Salesforce plans to buy unstructured data management provider Zoomin to help power its artificial intelligence agent offerings and AI agent builder Agentforce.

San Francisco-based Salesforce plans to close the acquisition in its fourth fiscal quarter, according to a statement Tuesday. The vendor’s fiscal year ends Jan. 31. Salesforce didn’t disclose the purchase price but said that its financial guidance provided in August hasn’t changed.

“Proprietary unstructured data is powerful fuel our customers can use for AI agents and customer experiences, and Zoomin’s proven expertise and technology will accelerate Data Cloud’s innovation and enable our customers to get better value from Agentforce,” Rahul Auradkar, Salesforce executive vice president and general manager of unified data services and Einstein, said in the statement.

Salesforce Plans To Buy Zoomin

Auradkar continued: “This proposed transaction underscores our continued commitment to enable our customers to harness the value of all of their data into the #1 AI CRM through Data Cloud, as well as to activate relevant, contextual information to ground unique AI experiences with enterprise-leading trust controls.”

Salesforce has about 12,000 partners worldwide. CRN has reached out to Salesforce and Zoomin for comment.

Salesforce first invested in New York-based Zoomin in 2019, according to Tuesday’s statement. The vendor was also part of Zoomin’s 2021 $52 million Series C round of funding. A Salesforce AppExchange partner since 2018, Zoomin and Salesforce have hundreds of shared users, according to the statement.

Zoomin was co-founded in 2015 by CEO Gal Oron, who said in Tuesday’s statement that the acquisition is “a natural progression of our long-standing and evolving partnership” with Salesforce.

“As organizations are accelerating their enterprise AI transformation, our joint mission is to support them and make sure AI doesn’t hit the data wall,” he said. “As part of the #1 AI CRM, we will allow customers to leverage their existing enterprise data in ways they never imagined possible.”

The proposed Zoomin deal follows on the heels of Salesforce’s announced acquisition of data protection and management vendor Own Co. for about $1.9 billion in cash. That deal is also expected to close in Salesforce’s fourth fiscal quarter.

The announced purchases of Zoomin and Own notably come after Salesforce CFO Amy Weaver said in August that she plans to leave the vendor. Weaver will step down from the CFO role by Jan. 31 or earlier if a successor is named before then. She will serve as a special adviser to co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff through April 2026, according to a regulatory filing.

In a report Tuesday by KeyBanc Capital Markets, the investment firm said the deal “should aid in Salesforce's Data Cloud strategy, which is the leading edge of the Agentforce strategy” Salesforce executives touted during the vendor’s annual Dreamforce conference last week.

Salesforce executives called the company’s AI agents an improvement on the AI copilot model pursued by vendors including Microsoft.

“Unstructured data is a major complement to the structured data that already resides in a company's CRM,” according to the KeyBanc report, which estimated that the deal was for at most $400 million and that Zoomin has a $37.5 million revenue base.

Salesforce reported its latest quarterly earnings in August. The vendor reported revenue of $9.33 billion, up 9 percent year over year ignoring foreign exchange. It finished the quarter with $7.7 billion in cash and cash equivalents.

Salesforce said to expect third fiscal quarter revenue of $9.31 billion to $9.36 billion, up 7 percent year over year, and full fiscal year revenue of $37.7 billion to $38 billion, up 8 percent to 9 percent year over year.