Salesforce may be looking to strengthen its AI capabilities through additional acquisitions.
According to people familiar with the matter, the enterprise software company has recently been in discussions to buy Listen Labs, an AI-powered customer research platform, for roughly $2 billion. The talks are not finalized and may ultimately fall through, a person knowledgeable about the negotiations said.
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 Harvard undergraduates while building an AI avatar app that went viral and drew 20,000 users on its first day, according to Sequoia Capital. Juengermann had previously been a national champion in competitive programming in Germany.
The founders used an early version of what would become Listen Labs to interview users, which helped them recognize the value of applying AI to market research.
The company’s software automates much of the qualitative research process, which has traditionally been costly and time-intensive.
Its customers include Microsoft, Anthropic, Google, Nestle, Sweetgreen, and Perplexity. At the start of the year, Listen Labs said its annualized revenue had grown 15-fold and that it had interviewed more than one million people over nine months.
For Salesforce, the deal would support its broader effort to make Agentforce, its agentic AI platform, more than a tool for automating repetitive work. Listen Labs could enhance Agentforce by providing insight into what customers are thinking. It could suggest which products they may buy and help salespeople craft pitches designed to close deals.
If completed, the transaction would be part of a recent wave of AI acquisitions, including Nvidia’s roughly $12.9 billion purchase of HuggingFace and Stripe’s about $8 billion acquisition of OpenRouter.
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Salesforce has been working to improve its AI efforts, with a particular emphasis on enterprise agents. The Information reported that the company had considered acquiring HuggingFace before it was sold to Nvidia.
Listen Labs was most recently valued at $500 million in a financing round earlier this year. Its investors include Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Conviction Partners, and Pear VC.