Salesforce just bought a 6-year old startup for $360 million
Steelbrick will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Salesforce after the deal closes in April 2016.
The deal was rumored since last week when The Information first broke the news, but the deal size is almost half of the reported $600 million amount.
Part of the discrepancy may owe to the fact that Salesforce was already an investor in Steelbrick. So the final price might reflect what Salesforce paid without including its existing stake.
Steelbrick offers quote-to-cash technology that makes it easier for sales people to put together complex quotes and billings for potential customers. The company last raised $48 million in October at a reported valuation of $250 million.
Steelbrick is run by Godard Abel, the former CEO of BigMachines, another quote-to-cash software maker acquired by Oracle for $400 million in 2013. There's a number of popular quote-to-cash solutions in the market, but Steelbrick is different in that it mostly deals with small and medium sized business.
The Steelbrick acquisition marks the largest deal in more than two years for Salesforce. The last time it spent this much on a startup was in July 2014 when it bought RelateIQ for $390 million.
The addition of Steelbrick is expected to bolster Salesforce's Sales Cloud business, by far the largest segment of the company. But it's unclear how it plays into Salesforce's recent move to target larger enterprises, because Steelbrick is largely for smaller-sized companies.