Salesforce to acquire Fin, formerly Intercom, for over $3 billion

Salesforce today announced that it has reached an agreement with customer support software company Fin to buy the company for around $3.6 billion. Salesforce expects the transaction to close in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2027, and the acquisition will not change its financial guidance previously announced on May 27.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, in its press release, claimed that acquiring the startup gives Salesforce an immediate AI agent that resolves support tickets across email, WhatsApp, SMS, and Slack:

We're thrilled to welcome Fin to Salesforce as we enable every company to become an agentic enterprise. Fin brings proven agent technology, a deep commitment to customer success, and an incredible AI team that will complement Agentforce with powerful service agent capabilities. Together, we'll help companies of every size seize this opportunity, accelerating time to value with trusted agents that deliver measurable outcomes at scale.

You might know Fin by its former name, Intercom. If you have ever been on a website or inside a mobile app and noticed a little chat bubble widget floating in the bottom right corner of your screen, often featuring a friendly face and a message like, "Hi! How can we help you today?" you were almost certainly looking at Intercom.

Intercom became Fin just last month, transforming itself into an "AI-first" platform that handles customer issues with little need for humans to intervene. The new name originates from the company's highly successful AI customer service agent, which it launched way back in 2023. This digital assistant supposedly resolves about 76% of customer service volume end-to-end on its own, so the business rebranded to match its primary software tool.

Fin's new owners, Salesforce, went on an acquisition spree over the last few years, and some of them you might recognize, like its 2020 $27.7 Billion acquisition of Slack. The last few months saw the enterprise giant buy several startups, including m3ter, Momentum, Cimulate, and Contentful.

Salesforce said that when the Fin deal pulls through, customers will "deploy AI agents across" various service operations, which will complement Agentforce, the platform that enables businesses to deploy customizable autonomous digital workers.