What Salesforce’s New $8 Billion Buy Means For Startups
Marc Benioff's tech giant wants more data for AI agents. That's mostly good for startups competing with his new acquisition, Informatica, or providing data 'picks and shovels'.
On Tuesday, Salesforce announced an $8 billion acquisition of data company Informatica. Unless you compete with that 32-year-old company – or are a Marc Benioff super fan – you might not have noticed. Maybe you saw that headline and moved on.
Large-sized acquisitions like this shed tea leaves, however. Reading them can prove useful for startups and Upstarts curious about where trends are moving, from cybersecurity startup prices going up after Wiz’s $32 billion acquisition announced by Google, to experimentation startups fundraising after we scooped earlier in May that Databricks was buying one.
The consummation of Informatica’s courtship with Salesforce isn’t a big surprise. It was rumored off-and-on since last year. Informatica is really big — $1.6 billion in 2024 revenue — but it’s not really growing (3% for that year). Industry insiders tell Upstarts that by waiting, Salesforce got a cheaper per-share price. But the deal will also take a long time to close, not until early next year (by Salesforce reckoning, early fiscal 2027).
As one well-connected venture capital investor puts it to Upstarts: “this is as vanilla as you can get.”
But there are still multiple useful takeaways for the startup ecosystem, whether you compete with Informatica or are trying to understand where value is being accrued behind the scenes of enterprise’s AI push.
Upstarts spoke to a few Salesforce analysts, investors and startup founders who are broadly in Informatica’s category of data management to bring you a cheat sheet more tactically useful than opinions on what it means for Salesforce’s stock.
Salesforce declined an interview request.