Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Salesforce is buying an(other) AI startup.
The enterprise tech giant announced on Friday that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Spindle AI, an agentic analytics startup. Financial deals weren’t disclosed, but Salesforce reveals that it plans to integrate Spindle’s technology to bolster the “Agent Observability and Self-Improvement pillar” of its Agentforce 360 platform. This includes custom analytics, ROI forecasting, and continuous optimization.
“The future of the agentic enterprise isn’t about having the most data, it’s about making that data speak a common language,” Adam Evans, Salesforce’s executive vice president and general manager of its AI platform, remarks in a blog post.
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Founded in 2021 by serial entrepreneurs Ryan Atallah—who sold his last company to Salesforce-owned Tableau—and Carson Kahn, Spindle AI set out to teach AI agents how to help teams make smarter, data-driven decisions. The startup boasts that it blends advancements in neurosymbolic AI agents with its in-house multidimensional data model and scenario modeling algorithms to “answer business questions at the speed of thought.”
In other words, Spindle AI wanted to be viewed as a virtual data scientist accessible to any business, regardless of budget.
Notably, the company had yet to publicly launch—it states on its website that it would do so in Q4 2025, but now that doesn’t appear to be happening, thanks to the acquisition. Nevertheless, Spindle AI managed to raise more than $6.5 million in seed funding from investors including Accel, Caffeinated Capital, and leaders from Sequoia, Index, Palantir, Lightspeed, Stanford University, Okta, Handshake, OpenSea, JetBlue, Workday, and Salesforce.
Competitors include Gong, Kumo, and Jupiter Intelligence.
Like many of Salesforce’s acquisitions, this deal builds on an existing relationship: Spindle AI’s technology already integrates with Salesforce’s CRM platform, as well as Snowflake, Anaplan, Workday, Oracle, Microsoft Excel, and other tools. After all, if you’re building a data science agent, it makes sense to support the platform housing so much customer data.
“We built Spindle AI to intelligently close the gap between what questions enterprises want to ask of their data and what their data systems can understand, Atallah states in a release. “We have spent years solving the hardest problems in intelligent analytics, machine learning, and data infrastructure. Joining Agentforce allows us to deliver that deep technical focus directly to customers at scale, powering the next era of trusted, autonomous systems by accelerating Agent Observability and Self-Improvement features for Agentforce 360.”
Introduced last month at Dreamforce, Agentforce 360 is Salesforce’s next-generation agent development platform. It’s core to the company’s push to transform every business into an “agentic enterprise.” The idea behind it is to bring together humans, agents, apps, and data, giving organizations the means to escape what is often referred to as “pilot purgatory.”
If the Spindle AI integration is successful, the acquisition promises to give users smarter, more accountable, and self-improving agents. This includes better performance oversight—how are these bots behaving, reasoning, and making decisions? It could also enhance forecasting and analytics, helping organizations measure the impact agents have on the bottom line.
“The next generation of agentic systems will be measured by how well they can continuously monitor, explain, and improve their own reasoning, Kahn remarks. “We look forward to accelerating Agentforce with sophisticated agentic analytics and forecasting that make enterprise LLMs more reliable and valuable.”
Spindle AI is part of a growing number of deals that Salesforce has made in 2025, marking the first post-Dreamforce transaction. Previous deals include the massive $8 billion acquisition of Informatica, as well as startups Apromore, Moonhub, and Convergence. Salesforce anticipates that its Spindle AI purchase will be finalized by the end of 2026.
Featured Image: Patrick Stokes, Salesforce EVP of Product and Industries Marketing, speaks on the agentic enterprise at Dreamforce in San Francisco on Oct. 14, 2025. Credit: Ken Yeung
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