Fund doubles down on Salesforce Ventures’ backing of high-growth companies and visionary founders charting the future of AI
Dubai, UAE, 18 September 2024 – Salesforce Ventures is announcing a new $500 million AI fund, bringing its total commitment to AI innovators to $1 billion in the past 18 months.
The fund doubles down on Salesforce Ventures’ backing of high-growth companies and visionary founders charting the future of AI, driving market-shifting innovation, and delivering strong returns while prioritizing their core values of trust and responsibility. Salesforce Ventures connects portfolio companies with its ecosystem of leaders across the Fortune 500, and also helps startups balance trust, growth, and innovation through access to Salesforce’s Office of Ethical and Humane Use and other experts.
To date, Salesforce Ventures has invested in over two dozen AI companies, including market leaders such as Anthropic, Cohere, Runway, TogetherAI, Mistral AI, and Hugging Face. The new investments will continue to build on the organization’s stake in many of these companies, providing patient capital alongside unmatched growth opportunities and industry expertise from its enterprise ecosystem.
“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,” said John Somorjai, President of Salesforce Ventures. “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.”
“The AI landscape has evolved greatly in the past year, encompassing everything from powerful LLMs to business-boosting applications — yet no enterprise will adopt AI at scale unless they trust it will deliver strong returns and avoid putting their reputation at risk,” added Paul Drews, Managing Partner of Salesforce Ventures. “Our expanded investment deepens our commitment to helping the most dynamic and expansive innovators win the market by accelerating their growth through our customer network and delivering trusted AI that earns the confidence of the biggest companies in the world. Values drive value, and we know trust and responsibility are good for the world—and good for business.”
