Genesys has announced $1.5BN in new investment from tech giants Salesforce and ServiceNow.
Much of the funding will help repurchase shares from the company’s equity holders. However, Hellman & Friedman and Permira will remain majority owners.
Additionally, Genesys hopes to use some of the investment to build out its unified CCaaS-CRM offerings with Salesforce and ServiceNow.
Launched over the past 18 months, the CX Cloud from Genesys and Salesforce and Unified Experience from Genesys and ServiceNow solutions embed some of Genesys’ contact center tools into their respective CRM systems for customer support teams.
These are: Salesforce Service Cloud and ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM).
Genesys will also continue to invest in orchestrating and automating end-to-end customer fulfilment workflows, which cross its platform, CRM systems, and middle-/back-office systems.
Celebrating the news, Tony Bates, Chairman and CEO of Genesys, said: “Genesys is delivering long-term value to enterprises through end-to-end customer experience orchestration that can drive loyalty, grow revenue, and reduce operating costs.
We’re proud to have the support of industry leaders like Salesforce and ServiceNow, and we believe this reflects growing momentum around agentic AI and the importance of connected, autonomous customer experiences.
Earlier this year, Genesys became the first tech provider to pass the $2BN milestone in annual recurring revenue (ARR) generated from CCaaS.
Much of this is due to its legacy base of on-premise contact center customers, which it has successfully migrated to the cloud.
However, it proved ahead of the curve in announcing unified CRM-CCaaS solutions with Salesforce and ServiceNow, with many others now following its lead.
Indeed, since AWS, Five9, and Vonage have made similar releases. Yet, Salesforce and ServiceNow shared their excitement at pushing their relationship with Genesys forward.
“This investment deepens our partnership with Genesys to deliver AI-assisted and agentic AI-powered customer experiences across every channel, from voice to digital,” said David Schmaier, President & Chief Strategy Officer at Salesforce.
As leaders in our respective markets, we’re excited to further integrate our products and help redefine what’s possible in this new AI era, supporting our joint customers as they transform their contact centers and customer experiences.
Schmaier is correct to assert that Salesforce is the CRM leader. Indeed, it owns 20.7 percent of the market. Its closest competitor, Microsoft, owns 5.2 percent (per 2025 IDC data).
However, ServiceNow has aspirations to eventually usurp Salesforce with a new vision for the space, claiming that traditional CRM faces an “extinction-level threat” in the age of agentic AI.
The investment in Genesys and CCaaS-CRM convergence underscores these ambitions to slug it out with Salesforce at the top end of the market and enable end-to-end fulfillment.
“Our investment in Genesys accelerates our vision for the agentic enterprise, where the ServiceNow AI Platform intelligently orchestrates end-to-end customer experiences,” said Amit Zavery, President, CPO, & COO at ServiceNow.
Together, ServiceNow and Genesys are enabling businesses to deploy AI-based customer journeys that anticipate needs, personalize at scale, and deliver measurable outcomes.
Finally, it’s notable that Genesys stalled its IPO bid in March 2025.
Why? Because this investment gives them the funds to chase new growth opportunities, without having to issue shares and manage for short-term, quarterly results.
The Hot Take: Salesforce & ServiceNow Have Incentives to Optimize Their Relationships with Genesys
Sharing her two cents with CX Today, Rebecca Wetteman, CEO & Principal Analyst at Valoir, reaffirmed the commitment ServiceNow and Salesforce have made to not just partner but co-develop with Genesys.
She also noted that while Salesforce has a CCaaS integration program and ServiceNow announced other CCaaS partners at Knowledge 2025, “this is a pretty strong statement.”
Interestingly, Wetteman then stated, “Obviously, the market uncertainty makes this not a great time to IPO. This gives some of Genesys’s investors an exit.
We should note as well that both Salesforce and ServiceNow have a history of partnering with and investing in companies that they eventually acquire – and both recognize the importance of the voice channel.
“As competition between Salesforce and ServiceNow heats up, they both have incentives to optimize the Genesys relationship, and cash is one way to do that.”
This is a breaking news story. More coverage will follow.
