Salesforce’s M&A Blitz Reflects Broader Deal Rush
Anyone with an interest in tech will be glued to the TV or social media tonight, monitoring the midterm elections. As my colleague Shane Burke writes below, more than 20 candidates in state governor races support a moratorium on data center development. There’s also the California billionaire tax, Proposition 40, to track. But for those in tech fretting about the results, remember this: Nothing that happens tonight will change the relaxed antitrust regime we’ve got right now. That’s thanks to the Trump administration, not Congress.
And that means companies have got two more years to get deals done before the antitrust climate could change. That's why the tech deal scene lately has resembled that old “Supermarket Sweep” TV game show where contestants have a limited amount of time to grab stuff off the shelves in a supermarket. We’ve seen deals such as Marvell and Lumentum on Monday, DoorDash and Instacart last week, Fox and Roku in June and many others. It’s not just tech, either (think Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery). Overall, deals worth $2.6 trillion have been announced so far this year, according to Dealogic, 66% more than at this time last year.
One particularly aggressive acquirer has been Salesforce, which has been striking a multibillion-dollar acquisition seemingly every other week lately. On Monday, Salesforce announced its purchase of Cresta, which sells AI-powered contact center automation software, for a price we reported to be $2.7 billion. Also on Monday, Salesforce completed the purchase of Listen Labs, a deal the companies announced in September without disclosing a price.
Last month, Salesforce unveiled the purchase of Braze, which helps marketers improve customer engagement, for $5.7 billion. In September, it completed the $3.6 billion purchase of Fin, a customer agent firm. All up in the past 12 months, Salesforce has spent or committed to spend at least $25 billion on eight acquisitions, almost all of which were worth at least a billion dollars.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is a deal junkie, of course. In the 2010s, he kept the company growing by making deal after deal of ever-larger size, culminating in the $27.7 billion purchase of Slack in 2021. But those deals depressed Salesforce’s profit margins and free cash flow, hurting its stock and eventually triggering activist investor pressure that led to Benioff pulling back from M&A and focusing on efficiency. That had a big impact: Salesforce’s free cash flow as a percentage of revenue has jumped to 35% in fiscal 2026 from 20% in fiscal 2023. That means the company lately has been throwing off more than $14 billion a year, which has allowed vastly expanded stock buybacks and generated cash for acquisitions.
Notably, Salesforce has paid for its recent spate of acquisitions almost entirely with cash, a switch from its reliance on stock in the years before 2020. Benioff appears to have recognized the dilutive impact of doing deals with stock: Earlier this year, he said, “We have a much better understanding of how to do acquisitions that are accretive to the business but not dilutive to investors.” Of course, whether the payment is made in cash or stock, the deals still have to generate a return. On that point, the jury is out.