Salesforce to acquire customer service automation startup Fin for $3.6B

Salesforce Inc. today announced plans to acquire Fin, a major provider of customer service software, for about $3.6 billion.

The deal will help the cloud giant enhance its Agentforce suite of artificial intelligence services.

Fin was founded in 2011 as Intercom Inc. and went on to raise more than $200 million in funding. The company, which rebranded in March, provides a cloud platform that uses AI to process customer support tickets. Fin says that it resolves more than 2 million incidents per week across its customer base, which includes Anthropic PBC, Autodesk Inc. and about 12,000 other organizations.

Users can customize the platform in multiple ways. Fin makes it possible to train the AI models that underpin its platform on a company’s knowledge base, customer service best practices and other data assets. Additionally, developers can create workflows called Fin Procedures to optimize how the platform answers support inquires.

The process of creating a Fin Procedure starts with a natural language description of when the workflow should activate and what actions it should perform. Developers can then add integrations with external services. For example, a Fin Procedure designed to answer product availability questions can be connected to an inventory management application.

Companies can test their automation workflows before releasing them using a built-in simulation tool. It generates synthetic customer conversations that mimic the kind of requests a Fin Procedure would be expected to process in production.

After a company deploys an automation workflow, an analytics dashboard built into Fin tracks its effectiveness. The tool identifies opportunities to enhance the workflow’s output accuracy and the range of questions it can process. According to Fin, the dashboard also surfaces other data points such as the most common support requests submitted by a cloud service’s customers. Development teams can use that information to make user experience improvements.

Some of Fin’s features are powered by Apex, a custom AI model that the company debuted in February. It stated at the time that the algorithm solved 2.8% more customer support incidents than Claude Sonnet 4.6, which launched a few weeks earlier. Apex also outperformed Anthropic’s model on a response speed metric called time to first token.

Salesforce will use Fin’s technology to enhance its Agentforce suite of AI agent development services. The product lineup lends itself to, among other tasks, building highly customized support agents optimized for a company’s user base. Salesforce will use Fin’s platform to provide pre-packaged customer service automation workflows that can be deployed more quickly than a fully custom tool.

“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,” said Salesforce Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff.

Salesforce expects to close the acquisition in the fourth quarter of its 2027 fiscal year ended January 31, 2027.

Photo: Salesforce