FILE: An aerial view of Salesforce Tower in San Francisco on May 30, 2023. The tower’s namesake company is buying the publicly traded Informatica.
Brandon Sloter/Getty Images
One of San Francisco’s flagship companies is getting even more massive. Salesforce announced Tuesday that it has officially agreed to purchase Informatica, a Redwood City-based data management company, for a whopping $8 billion.
The Bay Area companies — and competitors, as Informatica makes some similar products to Salesforce’s MuleSoft — announced the acquisition agreement in a joint press release. The proposal is still subject to regulatory approval, but Informatica’s stock price jumped toward the deal’s $25-a-share value on Tuesday morning.
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Neither Salesforce nor Informatica sells directly to everyday people, but their technologies undergird swaths of the modern business world. Salesforce sells CRM, or customer relationship management, a category that includes tools for handling sales, marketing, IT and data. Informatica will likely bolster that final offering with its data management services — the company already touts more than 80 clients in the Fortune 100.
The companies, as is in vogue for the industry, have both been rapidly imbuing their products and their branding with artificial intelligence. Tuesday’s press release was no exception. “AI” made 27 appearances in the document, including twice in its first sentence. Salesforce is currently peddling “Agentforce,” tools meant to automate various tasks in a customer’s workflow. And Informatica’s “CLAIRE” — note the middle two letters — is a data management-focused automation tool.
Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO, wrote that the companies’ union will “enable autonomous agents to deliver smarter, safer, and more scalable outcomes for every company.” Amit Walia, Informatica’s CEO, said the companies “have a shared vision for how we can help organizations harness the full value of their data in the AI era.”
It’s unclear how exactly the merger might unfold logistically — neither company immediately responded to SFGATE’s questions about how it will use office space in the Bay Area. But the press release said Salesforce expects “substantial cost synergies” down the road. Informatica currently has more than 5,500 employees, while Salesforce has more than 76,000.
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“Our acquisition strategy is methodical, patient, and decisive — targeting transformative assets like Informatica when the calculus aligns to maximize customer success,” said Robin Washington, Salesforce’s chief operating and financial officer, in the press release.
The tech giant bought MuleSoft in 2018 for roughly $6.5 billion, Tableau in 2019 for $15.7 billion and Slack in 2021 for $27.7 billion.
Work at a Bay Area tech company and want to talk? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at [email protected] or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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May 27, 2025
