Salesforce Ventures has announced an additional $500 million AI fund. The additional funds will bring Salesforce Ventures’ total investment in AI startups to $1 billion over the last 18 months.
Salesforce initially announced $250 million in March 2023 for Generative AI. Within a few months, it doubled this amount and has now doubled it again. Salesforce Ventures has and will continue to back and support high-growth AI companies. It also backs visionary founders who are leading innovation around AI.
Salesforce Ventures connects portfolio companies with an ecosystem of leaders across the Fortune 500. Access to its Office of Ethical and Humane Use helps them to balance trust, growth, and innovation.
John Somorjai, President of Salesforce Ventures, commented, “Salesforce Ventures is a leader in helping startups scale market-changing innovations in the cloud, and we’re expanding on that heritage to bring the power of AI to all parts of the enterprise. The first $500 million we invested in this technology has powered growth across our AI ecosystem, and we’ll continue to incorporate learnings from across our business, partners, and customers to help build the AI leaders of tomorrow.”
Salesforce has already invested in over two dozen AI companies. It includes firms such as Anthropic, Cohere, Runway, TogetherAI, Mistral AI, and Hugging Face.
Who will Salesforce Ventures invest in?
Somoraj explained how Salesforce has invested in the AI journey for several years. It started with its investments in Snowflake and Databricks, which have provided the data platforms necessary for AI. Its next phase was to invest in LLMs. So what about the next set of investments?
In the press briefing, Somorjai explained, “In just the past 18 months, the AI landscape has evolved rapidly, encompassing everything from powerful large learning models to transformative business applications. This new funding is designed to capitalize on the moment, helping the most dynamic innovators gain a foothold in this market.
“We’re particularly excited to back entrepreneurs who are addressing some critical use cases across machine learning, operations, business applications, technologies that help deploy agents and models AI security and beyond.”
“What we want to focus on with the new funding is on some smaller case-specific models. We think these will require fewer GPUs to be actionable. Verticalized models that have specific use cases for vertical is very interesting.”
He then added that there is a second area they will look to invest in. “Tooling that helps models and agents be more effective and more accurate in the results that they’re there they’re seeing.”
Somorjai has acknowledged that AI Startups are hot, saying, “valuations do remain elevated for the best companies. Our goal is to get into those companies as early as possible where we can provide the most help from the product side.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Salesforce has had huge success in investing in AI ecosystems, with strong partnerships emerging from its legacy investments. This latest fund will enable it to continue making significant investments in the AI industry.
The guidance provided by Somorjai is useful for entrepreneurs. It will enable them to identify whether their idea is likely to be eligible for investment from the Salesforce fund. Salesforce invests globally and, with its in-house expertise and very wide market reach, is a very useful corporate investor to have on board.
What will be interesting to see is whether its next set of investments will be as successful as some of the first participants of the first $500 million.
