In second deal this month, Salesforce buys Israeli data management provider Zoomin
Salesforce seeks to tap into Zoomin’s technology to equip its AI-driven autonomous service chatbots with the capability to provide personalized answers to customers’ needs
Sharon Wrobel is a tech reporter for The Times of Israel.
Israeli data management startup Zoomin has inked an agreement to be snapped up by Salesforce in what marks the second acquisition by the San Francisco-based software giant in Israel in less than a month.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but it is valued between $400 million to $500 million, according to reports in the Hebrew press. The deal comes on the heels of an even bigger Salesforce purchase earlier this month when the cloud-based software giant announced that it will buy Own, an Israeli startup specializing in data backup, for $1.9 billion in cash.
Founded in 2016 by CEO Gal Oron, president Joe Gelb and CTO Hannan Saltzman, Zoomin has developed a technical content orchestration platform that uses machine learning analytics and nature language processing to aggregate and organize company data and knowledge from multiple sources and systems into one unified portal.
In the era of digital transformation, the platform is geared to help businesses integrate new AI capabilities into their products or applications, such as user guides, knowledge articles and community discussions, to create intuitive search and support experiences for customers. By making the full stack of company knowledge and data accessible to AI models and systems, the technology allows businesses to build customer support services that the firm says can provide the right answer to the right person at the right time.
“As organizations are accelerating their enterprise AI transformation, our joint mission is to support them and make sure AI doesn’t hit the data wall,” said Zoomin CEO Oron.
Salesforce, a maker of customer relationship management software, said that Zoomin’s technology will augment its recently debuted Agentforce, a suite of AI-powered autonomous agents, with “new levels of intelligence, enabling customers to build AI that provides real-time, data-informed responses and actions tailored to individual customer needs.”
“Proprietary unstructured data is powerful fuel our customers can use for AI agents and customer experiences,” said Rahul Auradkar, EVP of Unified Data Services at Saleforce. “This proposed transaction underscores our continued commitment to enable our customers to harness the value of all of their data through Data Cloud, as well as to activate relevant, contextual information to ground unique AI experiences with enterprise-leading trust controls.”
Zoomin is headquartered in NYC, and has offices in Tel Aviv and London. Since its inception, the startup has raised a total of $73 million from investors and VC backers, including Bessemer Venture Partners, General Atlantic, Salesforce Ventures and Viola Growth.
