It’s the biggest step yet in Salesforce’s mission to beef up its AI infrastructure and feed its agentic AI ambitions with cleaner, better-governed data.

The deal sees Salesforce offering $25 per share in cash for Informatica’s Class A and B-1 stock, adjusting for prior investments. Informatica, which started life in 1993 and now boasts over 5,000 customers across 100 countries, had a market cap of $7.1 billion when the deal was inked.

This move is pitched as a massive boost to Salesforce’s AI playbook.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff called it “a transformational step in delivering enterprise-grade AI that is safe, responsible, and deeply integrated with the world’s data.

“Together, we’ll supercharge Agentforce, Data Cloud, Tableau, MuleSoft, and Customer 360, enabling autonomous agents to act with intelligence, context, and confidence across every enterprise,” he said.

The deal has been brewing for over a year. Reports from April 2024 first linked Salesforce to Informatica, triggering a brief share price dip for the firms amid fears of poor integration and mixed signals. Informatica denied everything back then, but clearly something changed behind closed doors.

It’s not Salesforce’s first data push, either. Last September, it dropped $1.9 billion on Own Company, another data protection player. At the time, Salesforce general manager Steve Fisher said, “Data security has never been more critical, and Own’s proven expertise and products will enhance our ability to offer robust data protection and management solutions to our customers.”

With Informatica now in its grasp, Salesforce is betting big on the idea that the best AI agents are only as good as the data they’re built on. It now owns one of the most entrenched names in cloud data management. All it has to do now is make it work.