Salesforce agrees to acquire Braze for about $5.66 billion

On October 20, 2026, Salesforce announced a definitive agreement to acquire Braze, the customer engagement platform behind the email, push and in-app messaging of about 2,770 brands including Canva, Instacart and Venmo. Braze Class A shareholders would receive $47.50 in cash per share, for an enterprise value of approximately $5.66 billion.

The terms

Per the release, the transaction is subject to approval by Braze shareholders, required regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Salesforce expects it to close in its fiscal year 2028, which begins in February 2027. Salesforce says the deal does not change its fiscal 2027 guidance.

What Salesforce says it will do with Braze

Salesforce frames Braze as a complement to its four architecture layers: Data 360, Customer 360, Agentforce and SIForce. Within Customer 360, Braze is expected to strengthen Marketing Cloud's cross-channel personalization. The release also names BrazeAI, Braze's optimization layer for content, offers, channels and send timing. Patrick Stokes, Salesforce's president of applications and marketing, is quoted: "Braze was built to turn live customer behavior into personalized engagement at scale."

Salesforce already operates Marketing Cloud, the former ExactTarget, itself a high-volume email sending platform. The release does not say whether the two sending stacks will be combined.

The deliverability questions

Nothing about this deal changes how mail is delivered today. Braze customers keep sending through Braze, with their own domains and the IP pools their plan provides. Al Iverson, who ran deliverability at ExactTarget and Salesforce Marketing Cloud for fifteen years, wrote on Spam Resource on October 20 that "it's too soon to say how this will impact the email ecosystem and the world of deliverability", and listed the open questions as the two platforms' sending infrastructure, reputation management practices and the teams that run them.

Our analysis: the history of ESP consolidation suggests the questions that matter for senders arrive after closing, not before. They are whether IP pools are merged, which can change a shared IP neighbourhood overnight; whether DKIM signing domains or return-path hosts change, which requires DNS updates on the customer side; and whether abuse and compliance teams are kept. Infobip's purchase of SocketLabs earlier this year raised the same checklist, as we noted in our report on that deal.

What Braze senders should do now

Nothing urgent. Keep SPF, DKIM and DMARC aligned on your own domain, so that any future infrastructure change on the platform side is a DNS edit rather than a reputation reset. Senders on a dedicated IP should know which IPs they own, since those are the ones whose reputation travels with them. Our email authentication checker confirms the current setup in one pass.