Five9 to Buy Level AI for $325 Million in Cash

Five9 will pay $325.0 million in cash to acquire conversation AI startup Level AI, under a definitive agreement the company announced Thursday in a press release and a matching Form 8-K filed with the SEC.

The target is Ujwal, Inc., which does business as Level AI. The San Ramon, California-based buyer, a contact-center-as-a-service provider, said Level AI's board-unanimously-approved deal will let it sell AI applications both inside its own platform and standalone to enterprises that have not moved to its cloud.

What is Five9 actually buying?

Level AI builds four product lines on Latitude, its own family of models tuned for customer conversations:

• agent assist tools that support live human agents,
• quality management,
• Voice of the Customer analytics,
• AI Workers, automated agents that handle interactions directly.

The startup already processes more than one billion interactions a year, according to Five9. Its customers include Gusto, Chime, Empyrean, and VistaPrint.

The two companies are not strangers. They have partnered since 2022, with Level AI applications listed in the Five9 CX Marketplace and integrated into the Five9 platform. That history reduces integration risk and gives Five9 verified performance data before the purchase closes.

How will Five9 sell it?

Five9 laid out two distribution paths in the announcement.

First, enterprises that keep on-premises contact centers, or that run a rival cloud CCaaS stack, can buy Level AI's applications as standalone products without first migrating to Five9. Second, the same applications will sit in the AI layer of Five9's Genius CX Platform, which serves more than 4,000 customers.

The standalone path is the strategic point of the deal. Five9 chief executive Amit Mathradas framed the acquisition as both a product play and a go-to-market play.

"Our vision for the future of CX is one where AI and human agents work as a coordinated system, each making the other better," Mathradas said in the release. "Level AI will also give us a new way to reach enterprises that want AI today but aren't ready to move their contact center to the cloud."

Who leads Level AI?

Ashish Nagar founded Level AI and serves as its chief executive. He is a former Amazon Alexa product leader. Nagar emphasized continuity for existing customers in his own statement, saying that joining Five9 "brings our CX-native models and AI applications to thousands more contact centers around the world, while we continue to support the organizations that rely on Level AI today."

After closing, Level AI would survive as a wholly owned subsidiary of Five9 rather than being dissolved into the parent's engineering organization. That structure supports the commitment to keep serving standalone accounts.

What are the deal's financial terms?

The 8-K pegs aggregate consideration at $325.0 million in cash, subject to customary adjustments for cash, debt, transaction expenses, and working capital at closing. Five9 will pay from its balance sheet — no new financing is involved. Five9's board approved the agreement unanimously.

In its Q3 2026 investor presentation, Five9 said the transaction is not subject to Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust review, which removes the most common source of closing delay for deals of this size. The company expects the deal to close in 2026, subject to customary conditions. The merger agreement sets an outside date of Feb. 5, 2027, after which either party can walk away if closing has not occurred.

The same investor deck sketches Level AI's financial profile:

• roughly $20 million of standalone annual recurring revenue,
• growth of about 50% year over year,
• a similar growth pace expected over the next 12 months, before synergies.

On those figures, Five9 is paying roughly 16 times current ARR for the business — a premium that reflects the strategic value of Latitude's models and the installed distribution, not the revenue base alone.

What does the deal cost Five9 financially?

Five9 expects about one point of adjusted EBITDA margin dilution in 2027 from the acquisition. Management projects Level AI will reach EBITDA breakeven in roughly six months after closing, and that the deal will turn margin-accretive in 2028.

The announcement landed the same day Five9 posted its third-quarter 2026 results. Guidance in the earnings materials excludes any contribution from Level AI until the deal closes, so the acquisition has not yet touched Five9's public financial outlook.

Centerview Partners advised Five9 on the transaction. Sidley Austin served as legal counsel.

Why is contact-center AI consolidating?

The purchase extends a clear pattern: larger CX platforms are paying to tuck conversation AI startups into their stacks. Days before the Five9 announcement, Salesforce agreed to buy Cresta for an undisclosed sum to deepen voice agents inside Service Cloud. Cresta, like Level AI, said it would keep supporting other contact-center platforms.

Five9's version of the play carries one twist. Where most acquirers fold the target's technology into their own product, Five9 will explicitly sell Level AI's applications into rivals' installed bases first, then attempt to pull those accounts onto Genius CX later.

For contact-center buyers still running on-premises infrastructure, that packaging matters more than another bundled roadmap slide. Five9 is betting those enterprises will pay for Latitude-powered agent assist and automation now, and revisit a full CCaaS migration when they are ready.

If the standalone channel works, Five9 turns a $325 million product acquisition into a pipeline of cloud migrations; if it does not, the company still holds the models and the billion-interaction training ground behind them.