Cognigy’s AI Chatbot Tech Fetches Nearly $1B In NiCE Deal – Dallas Express
Cognigy, an artificial intelligence company from Germany, has secured a nearly $1 billion price tag in a sale to NiCE.
Earlier this year, The Dallas Express reported that the tech company relocated its U.S. headquarters from San Francisco to Plano. A few months later, the AI chatbot firm was sold in a $955 million deal.
Cognigy describes itself as a “global leader in AI-driven customer service solutions.” Its chatbot software, used by some of the world’s top brands, like Greyhound, Frontier Airlines, and Toyota, is designed to provide instant and personalized customer service “in any language, and on any channel.”
Cognigy was acquired by publicly traded company NiCE, itself an AI-focused customer service automation provider. The non-competitive deal includes a roughly $50 million time-bound holdback, made up of $25 million in cash and 158,000 American Depositary Shares (shares in a non-U.S. company, but held in a U.S. bank).
“This is not the end of the Cognigy journey, but just the beginning… NiCE is supercharging our vision to become the leading AI-first customer interaction platform on the planet,” Cognigy CEO Phillipp Heltewig said on a conference call, per D Magazine.
Heltewig says a structured retention program was put in place to keep the firm’s “most important employees” on board following the transition.
“I’m even more excited to buy the people… [Their team] is incredibly agile, fast, customer-oriented, and AI experts. It’s important to us to not only bring in the technology into our family, but we retain the team,” said NiCE’s CEO Scott Russell.
Cognigy, founded in 2016, currently boasts 300 employees, including around 50 in the United States. NiCE, which has partnered with the company for the past three years, expects that welcoming the firm will help more than double its revenue in Q1 2026 compared to the same period one year prior.
