Salesforce (CRM) has put M&A back in focus with a roughly $5.7b agreement to buy Braze, a move aimed at strengthening its mobile first customer engagement tools across the marketing cloud and the broader CRM platform.
Salesforce shares closed at US$229.17, with the 7 day share price return down 7.45% and the 30 day move down 2.35%, while the 90 day share price return is up 19.99% and the 3 year total shareholder return is up 12.60%.
See how Salesforce fits into the wider software landscape by comparing it with a curated set of 19 high quality undiscovered gems that recent M&A headlines have not yet brought into the spotlight.
Salesforce has just written a US$5.7b Braze cheque after a share price pullback. Is meaningful upside still in front of investors, or was most of it already captured in that 90-day run?
Most Popular Narrative: 10% Undervalued
At a last close of $229.17 against a narrative fair value of about $255, Salesforce is framed as undervalued, with the Braze deal feeding into a broader thesis that focuses on survival and cash generation rather than aggressive growth.
The per-seat licence was only ever the toll booth. The asset is the governed system of record: every customer, every deal, every entitlement, for about 80% of the Fortune 500. And the one thing an autonomous AI agent cannot do is act on a customer without getting into that record first. An agent with no permissions, no governance and no audit trail is not an asset, it is a liability waiting to happen. So the same automation wave that threatens the seat count is exactly what drives every serious enterprise deeper into the data layer Salesforce owns. The meter changes from per-person to per-action. It does not disappear.
See why 41 investors see Salesforce as 10% undervalued.
According to michaelyang, the most followed storyline assigns Salesforce a fair value of roughly $255.9, built on a 9% discount rate and a 19% profit margin assumption. That framework views the current $229.17 share price as pricing in a tougher future than the narrative expects, even after a 1 year total return that declined 11.6% and a 5 year return that declined 24.7%.
That same narrative leans on steady rather than explosive growth. It uses an 8.9% revenue growth rate and a future P/E of 18 to arrive at the fair value range. In other words, the story does not require Salesforce to beat its current 8.97% annual revenue growth or 3.26% net income growth. It only assumes that the existing franchise, with $43.9b of revenue and $9.7b of net income, keeps converting its entrenched position into cash flows that justify a moderate valuation.
For investors reading the Braze acquisition through this lens, the key question is whether the deal reinforces that consumption based, data centric meter described in the quote. The narrative already treats Salesforce as undervalued based on future cash flow potential. Any integration that deepens customer dependence on the broader CRM and marketing platform feeds into the same fair value story rather than creating a new one.
Result: Fair Value of $255.9 (UNDERVALUED)
Still, the narrative can break if Microsoft’s Copilot starts displacing Salesforce inside key accounts, or if AI agents erode seat driven revenue faster than data usage grows.
Find out about the key risks to this Salesforce narrative.
Next Steps
If this mix of opportunity and concern around Salesforce feels familiar, treat it as a prompt to pressure test the numbers yourself and move fast on your own view by weighing the 3 key rewards and 3 important warning signs.
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