Why Is Salesforce Stock Moving Today?

Salesforce stock is moving on its agreement to buy Braze, a maker of customer-messaging software, for $47.50 a share in cash, announced on Tuesday, October 20, 2026. The deal gives Braze an enterprise value of about $5.66 billion, and Salesforce plans to pay from cash on hand. The headline reached the MoveSurge news feed at 09:39:57 ET, and CRM rose from $240.46 to $243.45 over the next 15 minutes, a gain of 1.24%. Our reaction reading at ten minutes was 1.32%.

The shares had traded 2.6% lower before the open, Reuters reported, and CRM finished Tuesday at $242.44, close to unchanged, while Braze jumped 51.7% to $45.57. On Wednesday, October 21, CRM slipped 0.27% to $241.78.

What Salesforce is buying

Braze sells software that companies use to send personalized messages to their customers through apps, email and text, timed to what each customer is doing. Its revenue rose 26.2% to $227.2 million in the quarter to July 31, it had 2,789 customers, including Canva and Instacart, and it expects revenue of $910 million to $913 million for its fiscal year. Salesforce plans to combine it with Marketing Cloud and connect it to Data 360 and Agentforce, its AI agent product. The Braze brand will stay, and co-founder Bill Magnuson will keep running it. On a call about the deal, Salesforce said Braze will add to revenue growth and weigh on profitability in the near term, and it kept its fiscal 2027 forecast unchanged.

The third large purchase this year

Braze is Salesforce's biggest deal of 2026 so far. In June it agreed to buy Contentful for about $1.5 billion and Fin, formerly Intercom, for about $3.6 billion, and in late September it agreed to buy Listen Labs without disclosing a price. Those followed the purchase of Informatica for about $8 billion, completed on November 18, 2025. When Salesforce raised its fiscal 2027 revenue forecast to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion on August 26, about $200 million of the increase came from expected acquisitions.

What the deal terms say about the risk

The $300 million fee Salesforce would owe if regulators stop the deal is larger than the $191.4 million Braze would owe for walking away, and the deadline can be extended twice by 90 days to get regulatory approval. Piper Sandler noted that the purchase also removes a growing competitor to Marketing Cloud. Braze shares closed Wednesday at $45.68, $1.82 below the offer, a gap of about 4% for a deal that is not expected to close before February 2027.