SaaS giant Salesforce is entering into an agreement to buy data integrator and manager Informatica in a bid to strengthen its Agentforce’s data credentials, paying $25/share (totalling around $8 billion). Informatica’s current stock price is $23.86.
Salesforce says buying Informatica will give it a stronger trusted data foundation needed for deploying “powerful and responsible agentic AI.” It wants its Agentforce agents to work at scale across a customer’s Salesforce data estate. Salesforce has a unified data model and will use Informatica tech to provide a data catalog, integration and data lineage, plus data quality controls, policy management and master data management (MDM) features.
Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce, said: “Together, Salesforce and Informatica will create the most complete, agent-ready data platform in the industry. By uniting the power of Data Cloud, MuleSoft, and Tableau with Informatica’s industry-leading, advanced data management capabilities, we will enable autonomous agents to deliver smarter, safer, and more scalable outcomes for every company, and significantly strengthen our position in the $150 billion-plus enterprise data market.”
Salesforce claims that buying Informatica will:
- Strengthen Data Cloud’s leadership as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), ensuring data from across the organization is not just unified but clear, trusted, and actionable.
- Provide a foundation for Agentforce’s autonomous AI agents to interpret and act on complex enterprise data, building a system of intelligence.
- Salesforce CRM applications will be enhanced, giving customer teams the confidence to deliver more personalized customer experiences.
- Informatica’s data quality, integration, cataloging, and governance will ensure data flowing through MuleSoft APIs is connected and also standardized.
- Tableau users will benefit from richer, context-driven insights through access to a more accessible and better-understood data landscape.
Salesforce CTO Steve Fisher said: “Truly autonomous, trustworthy AI agents need the most comprehensive understanding of their data. The combination of Informatica’s advanced catalog and metadata capabilities with our Agentforce platform delivers exactly this.”
“Imagine an AI agent that goes beyond simply seeing data points to understanding their full context — origin, transformation, quality, and governance. This clarity, from a unified Salesforce and Informatica solution, will allow all types of businesses to automate more complex processes and make more reliable AI-driven decisions.”
Informatica CEO Amit Walia said: “Joining forces with Salesforce represents a significant leap forward in our journey to bring data and AI to life by empowering businesses with the transformative power of their most critical asset — their data. We have a shared vision for how we can help organizations harness the full value of their data in the AI era.”
Background
Informatica was founded by Gaurav Dhillon and Diaz Nesamoney in 1993. It went public on Nasdaq six years later and was subsequently acquired in 2015 by private equity house Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for $5.3 billion. Microsoft and Salesforce Ventures participated in this deal, meaning Salesforce has had a close aquaintance with Informatica since then. Amit Walia was promoted to CEO in January 2020 from his role as President, Products and Marketing. Informatica then returned to public ownership with an NYSE listing in 2021.
Eric Brown, Informatica’s CFO quit in early 2023 for other opportunities, when it laid off 7 percent of its headcount; around 450 employees. It bought data management tool supplier Privitar in mid 2023. Five months later, deciding to focus on its Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) business, it announced a restructuring plan, laying off 10 percent of its employees and cutting down on its real estate occupancy. A revenue history and profits chart shows the 2023 growth tailing off somewhat in 2024 with GAAP profits declining as well.
IDMC is a database/lake and cloud-agnostic product supporting AWS, Azure, Databricks, GoogleCloud, mongoDB, Oracle Cloud, Salesforce, Snowflake, and (Salesforce-owned) Tableau. Using its CLAIRE AI engine, it can ingest and aggregate structured and unstructured data from many different sources, with more than 70 source data connectors. Ingested data can be cleansed, classified, governed and validated. IDMC provides metadata management and a master data management service
Informatica integrated its AI-powered IDMC into Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform in mid-2024. It announced a strengthened partnership with Databricks in January this year. At the end of the first 2025 quarter Informatica was a $1.7 billion annual recurring revenue business with more than 2,400 cloud subscription customers and 119 trillion cloud transactions per month, up from 200 billion/month in 2015.
Salesforce was rumoured to want to buy Informatica for less than its $11 billion market capitalisation in April last year and has now looks set to take over the business for $8 billion.
The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies and is expected to complete early in Salesforce’s fiscal year 2027, subject to the customary closing conditions. It will be funded through a combination of cash on Salesforce’s balance sheet and new debt.
When the deal completes, Salesforce will integrate Informatica’s technology stack — including data integration, quality, governance, and unified metadata for Agentforce, and a single data pipeline with MDM on Data Cloud — embedding this “system of understanding” into the Salesforce ecosystem.
Comment
Will other large suppliers with agentic AI strategies and a need for high-quality data aggregated from multifarious sources now be looking at getting their own data ingestion and management capabiities through acquisition? If so that would put Arcitecta, Datadobi, Data Dynamics, Diskover, Hammerspace and Komprise on a prospective purchase list.
