Salesforce Ventures AI Fund: Where Are Salesforce Placing Their Bets?

Salesforce Ventures is a top-performing venture fund that invests in promising organizations ranging from FinTech, Health Tech, Security, and Commerce, to Impact and the Future of Work. Currently, there are 61 companies in the portfolio.

Salesforce Ventures announced their $250 million generative AI sub-fund, which they subsequently doubled to $500 million in just a few months. There are a handful that have received investment so far, which is only set to grow in number as time goes on.

Salesforce have told the story of how they pioneered AI in CRM. Back in 2015, Salesforce introduced Einstein – their AI technology ‘layer’ that can be plugged into different applications on the platform. There’s been a slew of steady investments in AI-related startups, with 50+ deals since the start of 2019. However, what’s interesting is Salesforce Ventures’ increasing appetite. In 2022, their 10 AI-related investments totaled $736M, and so far this year, four investments have totaled $705M.

Being at the forefront of generative AI within CRM with Einstein AI and the openness of the Salesforce platform to ‘bring your own model’, it’s interesting to see where Salesforce Ventures are placing their bets. Let’s take a look at the list of these market leaders in the space – after all, these could be the technologies that you will be working with in the future.

Anthropic

• Salesforce Ventures investment: Undisclosed.
• Total investment: $1.5B
• Latest transaction: Series C (May 2023)

Often referred to as Chat GPT’s biggest competitor, Anthropic is a research company that places emphasis on AI safety by working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. Their conversational AI model, Claude, and most recently Claude 2, has gained attention by surpassing its competitors by 30 times in terms of tokens. Tokens determine the scope of information that the model can analyze when generating outputs.

In what Anthropic is doing, we can see that Salesforce’s own messaging around GenAI is being well-aligned. From the Einstein GPT Trust Layer that helps to govern GenAI usage with company data (ensuring privacy and preventing bias, hallucinations, and toxicity) to the intentional friction approach (where no outputs from generative AI are being automatically applied into users’ workflows, requiring a ‘human in the loop’ at every stage).

You.com

• Salesforce Ventures investment: Undisclosed.
• Total investment: $45M
• Latest transaction: Series A (June 2022)

You.com is another revolutionary AI chatbot and search engine delivering personalized responses to queries with human-like replies and image generation. The collection of AI tools includes YouChat, YouCode, YouWrite, and YouImagine. One use case where the technology shines is research, providing citations and up-to-date information. Marc Benioff invested $20M in a seed round in December 2021.

Cohere

• Salesforce Ventures investment: Undisclosed (see below).
• Total investment: 434.9M
• Latest transaction: Series C (May 2023)

Cohere provides access to affordable, easy-to-deploy large language models. This gives computers the ability to read and write – for example, to better understand what your customers are saying or to write compelling copy that speaks to your target audience.

Cohere has received a total of 434.9M across three rounds. Salesforce Ventures invested in Series C, alongside nine other partners, totaling $270M.

Hearth

• Salesforce Ventures investment: Undisclosed.
• Total investment: Undisclosed.
• Latest transaction: Seed round (March 2023)

Hearth is in the market to deliver ‘next-gen relationship management’ with Agentic Network Management. Agentic products leverage AI agents to learn from, understand, and act on behalf of the user.

By tackling the growing complexity of our networks of relationships across both our professional and personal lives, Hearth “knows your network better than you could by centralizing, enriching, recommending, and acting across your network workflows”. By gaining Benioff’s interest, could this spell out the next generation of CRM?

Hu.ma.ne

• Salesforce Ventures investment: Undisclosed.
• Total investment: $230M
• Latest transaction: Series C (March 2023)

Hu.ma.ne have revealed their first device – the Humane Ai Pin. This is a new type of standalone device with a software platform that harnesses the power of AI to enable innovative personal computing experiences.

The two founders, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, have a rich tenure at Apple, in design of Apple’s most beloved consumer products, and software project management having executed critical projects. Marc Benioff invested in both Humane’s seed round and series A – both amounts are undisclosed.

Tribble

• Salesforce Ventures investment: Undisclosed.
• Total investment: Undisclosed.
• Latest transaction: Undisclosed.

Tribble is another strong contender in shaping the next generation of CRM. Founded in 2023, this GTM (go-to-market) automation platform streamlines sales, marketing, and product workflows.

Tribble integrates with your systems and data, and AI agents optimize your marketing assets, hone your outreach, and shape compelling product narratives – all while learning, adapting, and getting smarter.

Bonus: Data Lakes

Salesforce have been clear about the importance of data in making GenAI work for your organization: AI models + data lakes = data harmonization and GenAI for your business workflows.

In order to be trained effectively, LLMs require large amounts of data. Organizations with large repositories of data will use a data lake. While Salesforce has their own Data Cloud, the openness of their platform means that organizations can use their preferred data lake provider.

Snowflake is a highly popular data lake, which made headlines at Dreamforce ‘22, where their zero-copy architecture between Salesforce became a major differentiator. This means that Data Cloud can directly access data stored in Snowflake (and vice-versa) without moving or duplicating data.

• Salesforce Ventures investment: Undisclosed (Series G, totalled $479M across 4 investors, including Salesforce Ventures).
• Total investment: $2B.
• Latest transaction: Series G (Feb 2020).

Databricks gained unicorn status with their platform that unifies all your data, analytics, and AI in one place. The aim is to speed up BI (business intelligence) with all enterprise data in one place.

• Salesforce Ventures investment: Undisclosed (Series G, totalled $1B across 23 investors, including Salesforce Ventures).
• Total investment: $3.5B.
• Latest transaction: Series H (Aug 2021/March 2023).

Summary

Being at the forefront of generative AI within CRM with Einstein AI and the openness of the Salesforce platform to ‘bring your own model’, it’s interesting to see where Salesforce Ventures are placing their bets. Two main themes running through these key investments are ethical GenAI usage and the next generation of CRM.

Having doubled their Generative AI sub-fund within a few months of its announcement, we can speculate that Salesforce Ventures have their eye on more exciting start-ups to spend that $500M. Salesforce Ventures’ increasing appetite is apparent – in 2022, their 10 AI-related investments totaled $736M, and so far this year, four investments totaled $705M. After all, these could be the technologies that you will be working with in the future.