The Varosity AI GTM Report — Oct 20: Salesforce Buys Braze for $5.66 Billion

Today's big story was a deal: Salesforce agreed to buy Braze for about $5.66 billion to bring real-time engagement and AI decisioning into Marketing Cloud and Agentforce. ElevenLabs launched Eleven Realtime, speech-to-speech voice agents that answer in about half a second and are compatible with OpenAI's Realtime API. Otter.ai took $320M in non-dilutive growth capital from General Catalyst. Different came out of stealth with a $48M seed to run end-to-end B2B demand gen. And VideoGen unveiled Model 1, which generates multi-shot AI video up to ten minutes long, which raises the question of who owns disclosure when AI media is published. Today's stories: Salesforce to acquire Braze for ~$5.66B : $47.50 per share in cash. Braze's real-time engagement will be folded into Marketing Cloud and Agentforce, and Braze keeps its brand. Expected to close in Salesforce FY2028. CNBC · Press release (SEC) · Quartz ElevenLabs launches Eleven Realtime : v1 Mini and v1 Max speech-to-speech models with ~0.57–0.62s time to first audio. The API follows OpenAI's Realtime spec, and pricing has not been published. ElevenLabs · The New Stack Otter.ai raises $320M without selling equity : growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund. Otter reports 40M users and passed $100M ARR last year. TechCrunch · Business Wire Different raises a $48M seed to run B2B demand gen : an AI system that plans, creates and launches campaigns, with human approval before anything goes live. Led by General Catalyst. PR Newswire via Yahoo Finance VideoGen ships Model 1 : multi-shot AI video up to 10 minutes long, in a limited partner rollout, with invisible watermarks on outputs. GlobeNewswire · EU AI Act transparency code · California AI-ad disclosure law AI disclosure: this episode is AI-written and voiced by an AI host (Jack King) on Varosity.ai. Sponsored by Varosity.ai — one API and MCP server for 60+ AI video, image, voice and music models, every one at the provider's list price with no markup. Plans from $12/month or top up from $5; free daily credits to start. Connect your agent: https://varosity.ai/connect · Pricing: https://varosity.ai/pricing