Salesforce Inc. has signed a definitive agreement to acquire artificial intelligence customer research startup Listen Labs Inc., three weeks after reports first surfaced that the two companies were in talks.

Business Insider broke the news of the negotiations on Sept. 9 and reported that the price under discussion was about $2 billion. Neither company disclosed terms. Salesforce expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2027, pending regulatory clearance. The Listen Labs deal follows Salesforce’s agreement in June to buy customer service automation company Fin for about $3.6 billion.

Listen Labs builds AI agents that do the legwork of customer research. In a blog post Wednesday on the deal, co-founder and Chief Executive Alfred Wahlforss said the platform now “finds the right people, interviews them, analyzes what they say, and even simulates how they’ll behave.” Salesforce said the startup’s recruiting network reaches more than 50 million potential participants, with interviews possible in more than 120 languages.

The simulation side runs on digital twins. Listen Labs creates those from real customer behavior so a company can see how buyers are likely to respond before it commits to a decision. Research that used to take months can be done in days, Salesforce claims.

Salesforce plans to put the technology to work in Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud. Aman Naimat, president of Salesforce AI Labs, said in the announcement that the startup’s agents can “uncover context behind customer and user feedback.” The Listen Labs team, including Wahlforss and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Florian Juengermann, will join Salesforce AI Labs.

Wahlforss wrote that Listen Labs traces back to January 2023, when he and Juengermann moved into a San Francisco hacker house after an app they built picked up 20,000 users overnight. Microsoft Corp. and Anthropic PBC have signed on as customers since the platform launched in April 2025, as has salad chain Sweetgreen Inc.

Listen Labs is a venture capital-backed startup that raised $69 million in a Series B round led by Ribbit Capital in January. Sequoia Capital led $27 million in seed and Series A funding announced in April 2025, and it returned for the Series B along with Conviction and Pear VC. Evantic came in as a new investor. TechCrunch reported in September that the Series B valued the company at $500 million.

The same report said Listen Labs had signed a term sheet with Menlo Ventures for a $125 million round at a $1.5 billion valuation, then walked away from it to pursue the Salesforce talks. Annualized revenue was running at about $30 million at the time. Listen Labs said in January that investors had put $100 million into the company in total.

Image: Salesforce