Need to know

• Salesforce spent $5.66 billion acquiring Braze, its largest deal in years, to own real-time customer engagement data.
• Blacksmith hit a $1 billion valuation as AI-written code created a verification bottleneck that testing infrastructure now fills.
• Demandbase launched an AEO Agent this week, signaling that optimizing for AI search is now a formal B2B marketing discipline.
• Anthropic filed IPO paperwork on the strength of explosive revenue growth despite an $80.7 billion first-half net loss.
• Sierra and Stripe integrated so AI customer agents can complete card payments mid-call, collapsing service and commerce into one interaction.