Drift

About Drift

Financials

Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.

Products by Drift

All products by Drift reviewed by our AI panel of experts.

DriftAI Sales Tools

Conversational marketing chat, now part of the Salesloft revenue platform

Free7.5/10

How Our Review Panel Scores Drift

Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Drift's product on their own terms. They disagreed by 1.1 points — The Skeptic was the hardest to convince, The Domain Strategist the most positive.

Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.

Competitive Landscape

Who Drift competes with, and how they differ.

Intercom7.6/10

Drift's longest-running rival in business messaging — Intercom started as broader customer support/messaging and later added its own conversational marketing bots, competing head-to-head on the website-chat-to-pipeline use case.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Qualified7.4/10

Founded by ex-Drift/Salesforce executives specifically to compete with Drift on Salesforce-native pipeline generation (its Piper AI SDR agent), positioning itself as the enterprise Salesforce-first alternative.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

HubSpot6.8/10

Bundles live chat and chatbots into its CRM suite at lower cost, competing with Drift on distribution and price rather than matching its dedicated conversational-AI depth.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Zendesk8.0/10

Primarily a customer-support ticketing platform that added chat/AI bots, competing with Drift at the margins for service-versus-sales-oriented buyer conversations.

1 product reviewed on TopReviewed

Company Timeline

Key milestones in Drift's history, with sources.

1. March 2024Milestone

   Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Conversation Automation, Q1 2024

   Drift, by then a Salesloft company, was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave for Conversation Automation Solutions for B2B, scoring the highest possible marks in 17 of 33 criteria.

   prnewswire.com
2. Feb 13, 2024Acquisition

   Acquired by Salesloft

   Salesloft acquired Drift; financial terms were undisclosed. Both companies were owned by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners at the time. Founder David Cancel remained as Executive Chairman.

   martech.org
3. Oct 3, 2023Launch

   Launched Drift Engage, Site Concierge and Bionic Chatbots

   Drift introduced three generative-AI products — Drift Engage (buyer-intent scoring via a Lift AI data partnership), Site Concierge, and Bionic Chatbots trained on each customer's own content.

   diginomica.com
4. Sep 1, 2021Acquisition

   Vista Equity Partners takes majority stake, unicorn status

   Vista Equity Partners announced a majority-stake growth investment in Drift, pushing the Boston-based company to unicorn status; Drift had raised $107 million since its 2015 founding.

   techcrunch.com
5. Sep 26, 2017Funding

   Series B — $30M led by General Catalyst, Sequoia joins

   Drift raised $30 million in Series B funding led by General Catalyst, with Sequoia Capital joining as a new investor alongside existing backers CRV and HubSpot.

   fortune.com
6. 2015Founded

   Founded by Cancel and Torres

   Drift was founded in 2015 by David Cancel and Elias Torres, former colleagues at Performable and HubSpot, to build a conversational marketing and sales chat platform.

   forbes.com