Salesforce to acquire data protection specialist Own Company for $1.9 billion

Cloud-based CRM vendor Salesforce on Friday signed a definitive agreement to acquire data protection and data management solutions company Own Company for $1.9 billion in cash.

Salesforce said the growing use of AI and generative AI has heightened customers’ awareness of their need to protect and manage data, and Own’s solutions will enhance availability, security, and compliance of customer data across Salesforce’s platform. The deal comes in the wake of Salesforce’s failed $11.2 billion bid to acquire enterprise data management software provider Informatica earlier this year.

“This proposed transaction underscores our commitment to providing secure, end-to-end solutions that protect our customers’ most valuable data and navigate the shifting landscape of data security and compliance,” Steve Fisher, president and GM of Einstein 1 Platform and Unified Data Services at Salesforce, said in a press release.

Salesforce plans to complement its existing offerings — including Salesforce Backup, Shield, and Data Mask — with Own’s capabilities. The company said Own’s offerings will enable it to offer a more comprehensive set of data protection and loss prevention products.

Own has been a Salesforce Ventures portfolio company and Salesforce AppExchange partner since 2012. It has nearly 7,000 customers of the Own Data Platform, which provides data archiving, seeding, security, and analytics capabilities for SaaS data.

Salesforce expects the transaction to close in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2025, subject to regulatory approvals. The company does not anticipate changes to its existing fiscal year 2025 guidance and says the acquisition will not affect its capital return program.

The deal comes on the heels of Salesforce’s recent acquisitions of retail point-of-sale vendor PredictSpring and AI voice agent developer Tenyx. Salesforce’s acquisition of Own Company will be its largest deal since purchasing Slack for $27.7 billion in December 2020.