NiCE Ltd (NASDAQ: NICE) said on Monday it will acquire German conversational AI firm Cognigy in a $955 million deal, a move aimed at strengthening its AI-powered customer experience platform, CXone.
The deal brings together NiCE's CXone Mpower platform with Cognigy’s enterprise-grade conversational and agentic AI, enabling organizations to orchestrate AI agents across both front and back office operations.
Founded in Germany, Cognigy enables enterprises to deploy AI agents that can interact across channels and languages, including for clients such as Mercedes-Benz, Nestlé, and Lufthansa Group. The company is expected to grow annual recurring revenue by 80% in 2026, reaching a run rate of $85 million.
The transaction includes a $50 million time-bound holdback, comprising $25 million in cash and 158,000 American Depositary Shares. NiCE said it will fund the deal with cash on hand, and expects to close in the fourth quarter of 2025, pending regulatory approvals in the US and Germany.
Shares of NiCE were up nearly 6% on Monday morning, trading close to $172.
Analysts at Wedbush called the deal “strategic,” noting it could double NiCE's AI and self-service ARR by year-end 2026, add 150 to 250 basis points to cloud revenue growth.
“We believe the acquisition would further strengthen NiCE's cloud strategy moving forward as more opportunities for cross-selling across its customer base emerge as enterprises looking to leverage more AI agents across organizations to generate greater efficiencies,” Wedbush wrote.
“With enterprises looking to pivot away from human interactions in the world of CX to cut costs, NiCE looks to position itself with the increasing need/trend of AI-powered automated workflows for enterprises, creating improved capabilities while seeing greater opportunities to cross-sell/upsell into a larger customer as the two companies have little overlap in current customers.”