Salesforce could be on the prowl acquisitions to strengthen its AI capabilities.
The software giant recently was in talks to acquire Listen Labs, an AI-powered customer research platform, for about $2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The talks have not yet been completed and could ultimately fail, according to a person with knowledge of the deal.
Salesforce and Listen Labs did not respond to requests for comment.
Listen Labs was founded in 2023 by Alfred Wahlforss and Florian Juengermann, who first met as students at Harvard University while building an AI avatar app that went viral and attracted 20,000 users on its first day. according to Sequoia Capital. Juengermann was previously a national competitive programming champion in Germany.
They used an early version of what would become Listen Labs to interview users, which made them realize that using AI for market research would be extremely valuable.
The company’s software automates much of the qualitative research process, which is typically expensive and time-consuming.
Customers include Microsoft, Anthropic, Google, Nestle, Sweetgreen and Perplexity. At the beginning of the year, Listen Labs said it increased its revenue by 15x year over year and interviewed more than a million people in nine months.
For Salesforce, the deal would strengthen its broader search to make its agentic AI platform, Agentforce, more than just automating repetitive work. Listen Labs can boost Agentforce by understanding what customers think. It could recommend which products they should buy and make the perfect pitch for sellers to close a deal.
If the deal were to close, it would be part of a wave of AI acquisitions in recent weeks with Nvidia the acquisition of HuggingFace for approximately $12.9 billion and Stripe Buy OpenRouter for approximately $8 billion.
Salesforce has been pushing to improve its AI efforts, with special attention to corporate agents. The Information reported that they were considering a takeover Hugging Face before it was sold to Nvidia.
Listen Labs was last valued at $500 million in a funding round earlier this year. The backers include Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Conviction Partners and Pear VC.
