Salesforce buys Israeli startup Zoomin to feed more data to its AI agents – SiliconANGLE

Salesforce Inc. has returned to Israel to make a second major acquisition, splashing out to acquire a company called Zoomin Software Ltd. that offers tools for processing unstructured data.

The deal comes less than three weeks after Salesforce splurged $1.9 billion to acquire the Israeli cloud data backup specialist Own Co. It’s paying a lot less to buy Zoomin, with today’s deal valued at about $450 million.

Zoomin has previously raised about $70 million in venture capital to date, with its chief backers including Bessemer Venture Partners, General Atlantic, Viola Growth and Salesforce itself, via its Salesforce Ventures arm.

As mentioned, Zoomin is the creator of a content delivery platform that makes it possible to process unstructured data so it’s more accessible to artificial intelligence models and systems. The company’s platform helps customers such as Dell Technologies Inc. and Mastercard Inc. to get to grips with vast amounts of unstructured, technical content that resides within their organizations. Using Zoomin’s tools, this content can be fed into AI models, which can then deliver more accurate responses in replies to queries from business employees.

Salesforce was one of the initial investors in Zoominfo, making a strategic investment in the company back in 2018, less than a year after it was founded. That collaboration has grown over the years, with the companies launching a joint product earlier this year.

According to Salesforce, the plan is to integrate Zoomin’s technology with the new Agentforce platform, so customers can use organizational data to inform an array of agentic AI experiences.

The Agentforce platform, announced earlier this month at Salesforce’s annual user conference Dreamforce, helps companies to develop autonomous AI agents capable of complex decision-making and reasoning. With Zoomin’s data processing capabilities, Agentforce-based agents will be better able to understand and make use of unstructured data.

The acquisition should help Salesforce to position its AI agents as being more useful than those offered by competitors like Microsoft Corp. During its most recent financial earnings call last month, Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff told analysts that the company is being extra careful to avoid the same criticisms levied at Microsoft’s Copilots, which require extensive user input and prompt engineering, making them difficult to utilize.

“So many customers are so disappointed in what they bought from Microsoft, and copilots, because they aren’t getting the accuracy and the responses they want,” Benioff said, comparing them to its notoriously annoying Clippy assistant in the 1990s.

On the other hand, Salesforce says, its Agentforce AI agents are much simpler and more accurate. Because the platform is focused on creating autonomous agents that can handle complex tasks with minimal input, they can be much more helpful, providing greater value to organizations.

“These agents are autonomous, able to act with accuracy, come right out of the box, able to go right out of the platform,” Benioff insisted.

Once Zoomin’s technology is integrated with Agentforce, customers should benefit from improved customer service automation, more accurate sales forecasts and more effective marketing strategies. The ability to leverage unstructured data more efficiently will enable Agentforce to provide insights and actions that were impossible with traditional approaches to AI, the company said.

In practical terms, it could result in AI agents that are able to quickly sift through vast amounts of unstructured information, such as handwritten documents, to find the information they need to answer a user’s queries. Salespersons might benefit from deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences. They could also benefit from more sophisticated self-service options, the company said.

Salesforce said Zoominfo will first be used to tap into unstructured data within its Data Cloud and Service Cloud platforms, before being expanded to all of its cloud platforms in future.

Zoomin co-founder and CEO Gal Oron said the acquisition is a natural progression, considering his company’s longstanding partnership with Salesforce. “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,” he said.

Salesforce said the deal is expected to close during the fourth quarter of the company’s fiscal 2025 year, which ends in January 2025.

Image: Salesforce