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Welcome, Cohere!

  • Founders: Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, Ivan Zhang
  • Sector: Artificial Intelligence
  • Location: Toronto, Canada

The Cohere Vision

The invention of the Transformer models at Google Brain in 2017 was a revolutionary breakthrough that spread across Google’s product portfolio. The new model architecture was introduced in the paper, Attention is All You Need, which pioneered a new approach to neural network NLP that captured the context and meaning of words more accurately than previous NLP models, and serves as the underpinning of language models today. Aidan Gomez, the CEO and Co-Founder of Cohere, was a research intern at Google Brain at the time and one of the co-authors of the Transformer paper. Two years later, the impact and benefit of the Transformer model still hadn’t widely caught on outside of Google. As a result, Aidan, along with his co-founders Nick Frosst (who collaborated with Geoffrey Hinton, becoming Hinton’s first employee at Google Brain’s Toronto lab) and Ivan Zhang (who worked alongside Gomez at FOR.ai, an independent research group), founded Cohere in early 2019 to bring “Google-quality AI to the masses.” Fast forward to today, and they have successfully done that with a clear vision to build the leading AI platform for enterprises, offering data-secure deployment options in companies’ existing cloud environments, customization, and customer support.

Instead of focusing on artificial general intelligence (“AGI”) or creating large language models (“LLMs”) with the highest number of parameters, Cohere has chosen to focus on building a generative AI platform for enterprises that is easy to access, customizable, and secure. Cohere’s AI platform can be trained or finetuned for specific use cases that are most relevant to customers including writing content, building conversational chatbots, aggregating customer feedback and analyzing sentiments, and content moderation. Cohere has already found notable applications with leading companies including Jasper and Hyperwrite, for copywriting generation tasks such as creating marketing content, drafting emails, or developing product descriptions, and LivePerson, who Cohere is partnering with to deliver custom LLMs for customer engagement and turn conversations into live actions.

While its existing AI suite encompasses a significant amount of enterprise use cases today, Cohere continues to layer on more advanced capabilities. The company is working on retrieval-augmentation to ensure generation remains grounded in facts and action-based models that can interface with and drive external systems, allowing agents to take actions and drive processes. These models have the potential for higher quality automation and more complex workflows that customers can utilize.

The focus on being enterprise-facing has always been a part of Cohere’s DNA and instilled in the company a continuous desire to prioritize security and privacy. The platform is built to be available on every cloud provider — deployed inside a customers’ existing cloud environment, virtual private cloud (VPC), or even on-site — to meet companies where their data is. This is oftentimes a significant hurdle for customers and Cohere addresses it head-on. The company’s vision is always to push for better and safer models that customers can easily use while putting a premium on privacy and data protection.

Why we’re backing Cohere

We are eager to invest across the AI stack from the foundational AI layer, to tooling that helps companies train, finetune and deploy models, to applications that have unique data or distribution moats. The foundational layer is an area where we see significant value accruing and Cohere is one of the key players.

Many founders building at this foundational layer come from specific academic backgrounds given the deep technical know-how required for research and development, which often means they don’t have as much experience with GTM and business building. That was why when we first met Aidan and his co-founders, we were surprised to find how incredibly sophisticated and mature the team already is at speaking the language of their customers and having a clear vision for GTM. Over the course of our diligence, we further built conviction on the technical and commercial potential of the business, as well as a level of trust and confidence in Aidan and the leadership team he has gathered at Cohere’s helm. We believe Cohere is one of very few leading foundational model players that can capitalize on the generative AI paradigm shift. Cohere is one of the first few investments we made from the new $250 million Generative AI fund Salesforce Ventures launched in March 2023. Its distinctive enterprise-focused approach aligns with our own mission and values – we are excited to partner with Cohere and strengthen the relationship between our two companies.

Cohere is uniquely poised to capture the enterprise AI market: the company has industry-leading foundational AI, has remained independent and cloud agnostic, ensures data security for its customers, and is backed by a top-tier team that has both strong technical background and enterprise experience. Customers have consistently referred to Cohere as one of the most advanced AI providers in the world. Meanwhile, while academic benchmarks have their limitations, the Stanford HELM results (as of June 2023) indicate that Cohere is currently leading the pack in accuracy and fairness. Cohere also recently released the first-ever publicly available multilingual understanding model trained on authentic data from native speakers – it is equipped to read and understand over 100 of the world’s most commonly spoken languages. 

Cohere’s technical prowess comes from and is supported by a deep bench of great hires. Despite the intense competition for talent in AI/ML, Aidan and his founding team have successfully attracted well-known researchers in the NLP space, including Phil Blunsom (Chief Scientist at Cohere), who led DeepMind’s Natural Language team for 7 years (2014-2022) and has been a professor of computer science at Oxford since 2009, as well as Nils Reimers (Director of Machine Learning at Cohere), who built one of the most popular open source models (SBERT) and brings significant experience in embedding. Both the Chief Product Officer, Jaron Waldman, and SVP of Engineering, Saurabh Baji, have years of experience building products for enterprise use cases from their time at Apple and AWS, respectively. Jaron himself was a two-time founder who has built amazing products and successfully sold his startups to Apple and Rakuten.

On top of that, Cohere has demonstrated early GTM maturity with a laser focus on serving enterprise customers. Cohere has shown a clear and thorough understanding of how to drive GTM strategy in this space and create value for enterprise customers. The company is highly focused on building deep partnerships with a select group of enterprise businesses to drive the flywheel effect of selling to their downstream customers. Cohere can create custom models and provide custom re-training to really hone in on what these enterprise customers need. It built out capabilities for AWS Sagemaker and VPC or on-prem deployments early on, which is something that these customers look for right away. Additionally, the GTM team is led by a veteran experienced in selling into the enterprise market: Martin Kon, President & COO at Cohere, who was formerly Youtube’s CFO and a senior partner at BCG. As a result, Cohere’s keen focus on building customer-facing products has also allowed it to be more capital efficient with training and hosting models.

What’s ahead?

As we had mentioned in a previous investment blog, we believe we are at the beginning of the generative AI revolution, and we are still at the very first inning of putting AI into production for enterprise use cases. As customers become more and more sophisticated in choosing the right AI partners, the developers of AI are also constantly pushing the boundaries of what models can do and striving to build something that is better, faster and more powerful. Cohere is one of the companies innovating at the frontier and is well set up in this environment with the right team and right focus. We are beyond excited to be investing in this team and helping them accelerate the development of Cohere’s world-class AI platform and empower enterprises around the world to build incredible products.

Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, Cohere!

Welcome, Anthropic!

The Anthropic Vision

The advancements in foundational models over the last couple of years have precipitated a paradigm shift in how everyone uses, thinks about, and builds technology. While the landscape of AI research is ever-changing, an increasing area of focus that has persisted since day one is the safe and reliable use of AI systems. This has only received more attention in recent months as technologists, industry luminaries, and governments from all around the world came out to debate the potential benefits and harms AI can exact on humanity and the right framework for implementing regulation.

Anthropic is at the forefront of innovation driving this paradigm shift and has preempted this debate since 2019 when its founding team left OpenAI to make a concentrated bet on AI safety. Anthropic is founded by Dario Amodei (previously VP of Research at OpenAI), his sister, Daniela Amodei (previously VP of Safety and Policy at OpenAI), and a team of amazing former OpenAI researchers. Since its founding, the team has trained one of the most capable large language models (“LLM”) in the world today, called Claude. Claude is a general purpose model that excels at a wide range of tasks from sophisticated dialogue and creative content generation to Q&A, coding, detailed instruction following and reasoning. Recently, Anthropic released a lighter, less expensive, and much faster option called Claude Instant, which can handle similar tasks such as casual dialogue, text analysis, summarization, and document question-answering. Customers can request access to Claude and Claude Instant via API and try Claude in Slack.

Claude is based on Anthropic’s research breakthrough in Constitutional AI, which is a unique approach the company is taking toward AI safety. As AI systems become more capable, they can supervise other AI systems with self-critique and self-revision – the only human oversight is a predetermined set of principles. Claude was trained using Constitutional AI to promote the principles of helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty in its outputs and prevent misuse or harmful and undesirable behaviors. Because of the self-improvement aspect of Constitutional AI, it also allows Anthropic to improve model safety without sacrificing model performance. Claude can take a limited amount of the highest-quality human feedback, create synthetic data modeled off this feedback, and train itself on this data. This allows Anthropic to provide increased transparency and steerability while still maintaining high degrees of natural language fluency.  

Beyond its focus on AI safety and the high quality of its models, Anthropic is also winning enterprise customers’ mindshare with an increasing emphasis on customization, which will drive long-term defensibility. It enables customization through a few different areas, such as incorporating a customer’s expert human-labeled feedback to the model, making it better at specific tasks, or working with the customer to create a “constitution” that is based on values and branding of the company to shape overall behavior of the model.

Why we’re backing Anthropic

Claude’s capabilities and Dario’s long-term vision for the company quickly captivated us. As we spent more time with the Anthropic team, it was clear that Anthropic and Salesforce share a clear vision for creating innovative technology that is rooted in safety. We built strong conviction that Anthropic is one of very few foundational model players that have built the right technology and have the right team to capitalize on this paradigm shift. Anthropic is one of the first investments we made out of the new $250 million Generative AI fund Salesforce Ventures launched in March 2023. We are excited to partner with Anthropic and strengthen the relationship between our two companies. 

As we look at the AI tech stack, we believe value will accrue in the AI tech stack at the core foundational model layer. Anthropic is one of a few companies operating at this layer that has built technological differentiation and is well-positioned to maintain its lead. The technical know-how needed to train foundational models to a highly performative state is rare, and the capital needed to purchase compute for model training and hosting creates a natural barrier that prevents heavy proliferation. While the open-source side of the AI community has made more progress recently, there are still meaningful questions around safety of use and a clear and significant gap between the performance of open-source and closed-source models in production. Anthropic’s models are viewed as some of the best in the world by customers, developers, and academic institutions. The important research the Anthropic team has published around Constitutional AI, reinforcement learning from human feedback (“RLHF”), and others also indicate that it has the technical capabilities today to compete with others. Both open and closed source will continue to evolve, and there will be demand for both types of models – the future will be hybrid. In the meantime, Anthropic is well positioned to support growth and push forward the next generation of Claude.

On top of that, Anthropic has an A+ team with an incredibly strong research background. Anthropic is led by the former head of research at OpenAI, Dario Amodei, who spearheaded the GPT-2 and GPT-3 projects. The rest of the founding team and technical leadership come from OpenAI, Google Brain, and Baidu (leaders in AI research who co-authored the papers at OpenAI). One of the members of the founding and leadership team is Jared Kaplan, a theoretical physicist by training who taught at Johns Hopkins for over 10 years. Jared was a research consultant at OpenAI and developed the alignment model that is essential to Constitutional AI and Claude. A specialized research background is required to maintain a technical advantage and truly compete in a fast moving environment where new model developments are happening weekly if not daily. The gravitas and mindshare Anthropic holds in the research community also helps them attract the right talent in an arena where competition for talent is becoming more intense. 

Constitutional AI remains a key differentiator and aligns well with Salesforce values. Anthropic’s research team pioneered the concept of Constitutional AI which enables models to be trained with a set of constraints designed to promote helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty. This approach and its continuous focus on safe AI aligns well with Salesforce’s vision for trusted generative AI and is a key differentiator as AI safety is always top of mind for Salesforce and its customers. 

What’s ahead?

We are in the first inning of generative AI adoption. A new survey of more than 500 senior IT leaders conducted by Salesforce reveals that 67% are prioritizing generative AI for their businesses within the next 18 months, with one-third naming it as a top priority. Most of them believe that generative AI is a “game changer,” and the technology has the potential to help them better serve their customers, take advantage of data, and operate more efficiently. As the survey results suggest, enterprise usage of AI systems will continue to grow, and customers will only become more mature and sophisticated in evaluating AI technology. Concurrently, regulatory changes are inevitable and will help create a structure for AI system deployments. Anthropic is well positioned to address any challenges coming out of this environment, and we expect Claude to become one of the go-to LLM partners for customers. 

Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, Anthropic!

Salesforce Ventures Launches $250M Generative AI Fund

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of our new $250 million generative AI fund to bolster the startup ecosystem and spark the development of responsible generative AI. 

Learn more about it from our team and companies within the fund here.

Welcome, WeaveGrid!

The Opportunity

A decade ago, decarbonizing the transportation sector was a daunting task, but the landscape has drastically changed, and today the electric vehicle (EV) era has officially arrived. Estimates suggest that over 25% of all cars on the road will be EVs by 2030, and auto manufacturers have committed $200B in investments towards transitioning their new fleets to be at least 50% electric over the next eight years. The rise in EV production is driven both by booming consumer demand in recent years and policy and regulation at the federal and state level. The Inflation Reduction Act (”IRA“) is monumental legislation that provides increased and lasting incentives for consumers across income levels to choose EVs over fuel combustion vehicles. It also increases incentives for automakers to produce more EVs and further invest in their deep supply chains. We also see states like California passing regulation mandating that all new car sales must be fully electric by 2035. While the new opportunity for automakers is exciting, they are increasingly mindful of ensuring their consumers have the best possible experience. One pain point unique to EVs for consumers is their well-documented “range anxiety” and worry about when to optimally charge their EVs. 

With the accelerating transition to EVs also comes a critical problem for utilities: how to manage the power grid to support the increased load demand from charging EVs. To address this challenge, utilities will need to make significant upgrades in grid infrastructure and invest in software solutions to complement their capital expenditures.    

The Solution

WeaveGrid directly solves the problems facing utilities, automakers, and consumers with the rise in EVs. Their product connects EVs to the grid in an autonomous way, leveraging the best rates for charging while mitigating overload risks to the grid. From the utilities’ perspective, WeaveGrid enables them to understand how EVs are operating on the grid (when they are charging, when they are in motion, etc.), manage the load so that EVs do not overwhelm electricity capacity, and dictate when cars should be charging, all while ensuring that the car owners are meeting their own charge requirements to operate their vehicles. Optimizing the grid also has a significant impact on how clean the energy sources to the grid are and allows utilities to minimize the need to turn on peaker plants, which emit disproportionately high levels of pollutants and are also the most expensive sources of energy. For resource-constrained utilities, WeaveGrid provides measurable ROI, significantly reducing the costs of managing EVs on the grid by 70% annually.  

For automakers who have committed billions in capital to electrifying their vehicle offerings, WeaveGrid helps ensure the electric grid can serve the millions of new EV drivers entering the scene. Automakers are taking a hands-on approach to helping first-time EV drivers understand the charging experience. By improving the driver experience around home charging and building WeaveGrid into their increasingly sophisticated tech stacks, automakers are also delivering ROI in software-defined vehicles as part of their ambitions to diversify revenues into software and services. 

For consumers, WeaveGrid provides a seamless experience for EV owners to charge their vehicles in the most optimal way, regardless of where they are. With 80% of charging happening at home, WeaveGrid’s solution provides utility cost transparency and savings recommendations to help consumers validate the switch to electric. The WeaveGrid solution is cost-effective and reduces range anxiety for drivers. WeaveGrid’s platform is also incredibly easy for consumers to use; the platform prompts the owner to set their personal charging requirements and goals, and then enables WeaveGrid to manage the right time to charge at the lowest possible prices. This seamless integration between the vehicle and the grid signifies a first-of-its-kind relationship between the EV owner, their vehicle, and the grid. 

Why we’re backing WeaveGrid

WeaveGrid is the first investment that the Salesforce Ventures Impact Fund has led, owing to our strong conviction that WeaveGrid is a category-leading company building the future of climate technology. In the time that we spent getting to know the market, the business, and the team, we reinforced our thesis that WeaveGrid is uniquely positioned to execute on sectoral tailwinds to capture a very large market opportunity and meaningfully decarbonize the transportation and energy sectors. 

Co-Founders Apoorv Bhargava (CEO) and John Taggart (CTO) both bring highly relevant experience to a business that operates at the intersection of utilities and automakers. Apoorv has spent his entire career working in the energy sector, deploying utility grid management programs at both NRG and Opower. John brings deep technical auto experience and is a leading expert in EVs and their impact on the grid from his time working in Tesla’s Office of the CTO and on the Special Projects team at Nissan leading product innovation. Together, they have the combined skill set to build a sophisticated technology stack that sits at the intersection of two rapidly transforming industries. 

And the proof points are compelling: WeaveGrid operates in thirteen states and serves leading U.S. utilities, including Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), Exelon Utilities, and Xcel Energy. WeaveGrid’s PG&E launch is especially significant; among all US utilities, PG&E hosts the most EVs on its grid, with one in six EVs in the U.S. registered in their service area. WeaveGrid has also partnered with many of the key automakers. As WeaveGrid’s utility and auto network continue to grow, more and more U.S. customers will have access to their product to optimize charging.

What’s ahead?

As automakers accelerate EV production, and as grid management continues to be a critical pain point for utilities, both industries need agile solutions to help mitigate costs and enable the shift to electrification. WeaveGrid is at an exciting moment to be the leading software company enabling this transition.

With almost 25% of all GHG emissions in the U.S. coming from transportation, shifting to electric vehicles is imperative to meeting our country’s goal of reducing overall emissions by 50% by 2030. We see WeaveGrid as a critical piece of this puzzle with its innovative software solution for both utilities and automakers. 

Please join us in welcoming WeaveGrid to Salesforce Ventures!

Transforming Tomorrow: The Business of Belonging with Jasmine Shells of Five to Nine

Employees who work after-hours to build community at their jobs are greatly appreciated by their peers, but rarely well-rewarded by their employers. That’s about to change.

By now we’ve all seen research showing the value of diverse teams. Organizations across the country have been making strides toward recruiting from a broader pool of talent. More recently, business leaders have focused on retention as they learned about the importance of feeling welcome at work. From The Great Resignation to The Quiet Quit, we’re witnessing a broad rejection of old corporate culture rules and a movement toward helping employees feel more deeply connected to their colleagues about things that personally matter to them. 

“Over the past few years, we saw different trends or shifts that put leverage into employees’ hands. Employees are advocating for a workplace where they belong. It’s not just ‘We pay top dollar and have the best benefits,’ because everyone can do that,” says Jasmine Shells, Co-founder and CEO of Five to Nine. “How are you going to create a best-in-class, winning, and inclusive workplace? How do you create opportunities to connect in a hybrid world?”

“Your nine-to-five only describes a portion of who you are; we also want to know who you are outside of work. Your five-to-nine is what you want to accomplish and who you are and what you value and want to dedicate your time to.” 

— Jasmine Shells, Co-founder and CEO, Five to Nine

Deloitte found that when employees feel like they belong, companies see a 56% increase in job performance, a 167% increase in employer net promoter score, a 50% reduction in turnover, and a 75% decrease in sick days. In a 2021 article, a group of analysts at McKinsey concluded that when employees feel their personal purpose is aligned with their company’s purpose, they are more engaged and loyal. As we wrote in our Cloud 100 coverage earlier this month, we are seeing more and more CEOs of fast-growing companies attribute a significant amount of their success and competitive advantage to the strength of their culture and community.

And yet, the work of community building, which can include building affinity groups, leading Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), connecting people through a shared sense of purpose, and generally bringing people together, is often unpaid, under-resourced and under-recognized. “More than 90% of Fortune 100 companies have ERGs, but fewer than 10% of those have any way to measure impact,” says Shells. “Companies are spending thousands to millions on programming and typically have no way of measuring their impact on culture, inclusion, and the business.”

Chicago-based Five to Nine aims to solve these and other problems with its event management software for the workplace. The company offers multiple tools to help your company build, manage and measure events, communities, and their outcomes. Five to Nine offers templated event landing pages, as well as contact and guest list trackers. The software is integrated with communication tools from Google, Outlook and Slack, among others, so it’s easy to reach out to employees wherever they already are. Five to Nine makes it easy to send surveys, run analytics on who did and didn’t show up, and compute net promoter scores. 

One customer told Shells that when her boss asked for a year-end report on all of her ERG-related activities, she previously threw together an incomplete document based on memory. But after getting Five to Nine, she was able to easily work up a detailed progress report, including data and feedback to support the assertion that ERG programs were increasing employee retention for participants. Her boss was so impressed that she got a promotion. 

“We care a lot about eradicating the diversity tax,” says Shells. “ERG leaders are spending 15-40 hours monthly outside their jobs helping to retain the best talent, but they aren’t getting paid or being recognized. When there is no data, there is no review.”

Five to Nine was born from personal frustration. After college, Shells worked as an IT consultant and spent the majority of her time on the road. She enjoyed the perks, but also felt lonely and disconnected. One day, her mother told her that she had the power to do something about it. She reminded her that when her mother would take her shopping as a little girl, Shells wouldn’t leave until she had chatted up everyone in the grocery store. “That conversation helped me realize that my nine-to-five and my five-to-nine don’t have to be exclusive,” says Shells. 

Soon after that call with her mother, Shells started taking steps to create a mentorship program for employees at her firm, as well as a Black Professional Network group. Once she began rolling out those programs, she realized how difficult it was to plan events, boost engagement, and determine impact. She was juggling emails, spreadsheets and design software, among other things, but struggled to keep it all together and wondered if there might be a way to streamline the whole process. 

Helping community builders become more efficient is the first step toward a bigger vision. Shells wants to launch a movement that will expand communities, increase diversity, and elevate the role to reflect its growing importance. The company hosts an annual event for its burgeoning community of community builders to network with one another and share ideas. The most recent event in January attracted more than 1,500 people from all over the country. “We started with a best-in-class product. Next up is sharing best practices and trends in the market,” says Shells. “We’re creating a category.”

Welcome, Balance!

The Problem

We’ve all experienced the magic of the easy eCommerce purchase experience – whether that’s guilty pleasures bought off Instagram or buying your basics on Amazon.

But if you’re a business, the experience remains totally different, even in 2022. Say you’re buying industrial chemicals or restaurant supplies, what is your experience like? Answer: phone calls back and forth with suppliers, handling invoices, dealing with wonky ACH transfers or giving credit card details over the phone and sometimes even a fax machine gets involved!

Further complicating matters, businesses are looking to buy from their suppliers on “net terms” – i.e., telling the supplier: “I’m a creditworthy business – you can trust me and we’ll settle the invoice in 30 to 90 days.” In fact, 70% of B2B transactions are done on net terms. But offering net terms means the supplier must understand the credit risk of the buyer and only collects the cash later. This burdens suppliers with the processes of underwriting credit risk and chasing collections, all while tying up their cash in working capital. Balance is solving the complexity of the B2B payment experience – bringing Stripe-like simplicity to B2B trade.

What’s Changing Now?

The B2B commerce market is over $120 trillion, ~5x the size of the B2C market. Yet it is far less digitized with only ~7% of B2B sales done through eCommerce vs. ~19% of B2C sales. This is changing now for three reasons:

  • the pandemic forced B2B buyers and sellers to use digital channels because they could not physically sell in-person, e.g. trade shows 
  • B2B sellers realized that they can make big efficiency gains by offering digital, self-service ways to buy, reducing overhead tied up in manual, paper-based processes
  • the rise of e-commerce in retail trade is seeping into the B2B mentality.
  • Thanks to these changes, McKinsey finds that now B2B sellers are offering ecommerce buying channels more frequently than in-person selling for the first time.

Alongside the changing habits in B2B trade, we are seeing the rise of B2B marketplaces with their sales growing over 130% in 2021 to $56B. Marketplaces have emerged as a more efficient way to match buyer and seller demand. 

Serving this rising landscape of digital B2B commerce and marketplaces, while catering to the complexity of B2B trade, demands new infrastructure. That’s where Balance’s solution for B2B payments comes in.

Balance’s Solution

Balance offers an end-to-end platform for B2B payments with a modern, API-first approach. This caters to all the particularities of B2B payments, including cards, wires, ACH, checks, installment and milestone-based payments. Importantly, Balance has a fully integrated net terms offering that allows businesses of all sizes to get paid upfront while offering 30-90 day terms to their customers – instantly. This is underpinned by a robust credit underwriting approach that best suits the counterparties of each client or marketplace.

Importantly, with Balance’s best-in-class, developer-friendly API infrastructure, it’s as easy to implement Balance into an eCommerce experience or B2B marketplace as it is with Stripe.

Why We’re Backing Balance

We are excited about the size of the opportunity, the secular tailwinds, the quality of the product, but most importantly, the Balance team. Bar and Yoni, Balance’s co-founders are driven but humble, kind leaders. They met while working together at PayPal and have deep expertise in payments, risk and data. We believe they are building an attractive organization with a compelling vision of the future of B2B trade. In fact, one customer told us that if they had a friend looking for a job in fintech, he’d recommend they go work for Balance – quite an endorsement.

Balance is emerging as a market leader in B2B payments, winning praise from dozens of blue-chip clients and on track to process hundreds of millions in payment volumes in less than a year from launch. 

Our support of Balance aligns with Salesforce Ventures’ belief in the ongoing modernisation of payments infrastructure, alongside our investments in Modern Treasury, Stripe, Flutterwave, GoCardless, Razorpay and more. Further, we are backers of the enablers of the rise of eCommerce such as Vercel, Contentful, Bringg, Stord and Forter, and we believe Balance is bringing the same innovation to B2B commerce.

What’s Ahead?

We are just at the beginning of the digitization of the huge B2B trade market. And we believe that a dedicated payments infrastructure, that brings consumer-grade experience to B2B commerce and is tailored to the specific needs of B2B trade, is needed to power this change. Balance is the stand-out leader in this space on team, product and traction. We’re excited to support the next phase of their journey. 

We hope you will join us in welcoming Balance to Salesforce Ventures!

Welcome, Medallion!

Clinical operations are a bottleneck for healthcare organizations.

State license management, payor enrollment, and credentialing are plagued by manual processes. Sources to verify licenses, sanctions, and important records are fragmented at both the state and federal levels. For example, obtaining a physician license to practice in Texas takes 4-6 months, and enrolling a payor takes ~90 days. To add to the burden – payors need to credential providers on a recurring basis, and once providers are enrolled, there are recurring education, ongoing monitoring, and specialty accreditation requirements.

These issues have been compounded in recent years, with the rise of telemedicine and virtual care services, which have reshaped the way that patients access care. With virtual care, providers are often practicing in multiple states, sometimes nationwide – which means they need to be licensed in all states.

The pandemic has exposed many inefficiencies in our healthcare system, acting as a catalyst for health plans, providers, and health systems to adopt new technology.  Yet, when it comes to clinical operations, many organizations still rely on employees and leverage outdated legacy solutions, leading to an estimated $1T spent on healthcare administration annually.

Medallion is the first solution for healthcare companies to fully offload their clinician operations—state license management, payor enrollment, credentialing, and more—in one modern management platform.

Salesforce Ventures believes in digitizing legacy healthcare back-office operations. That is why we’re proud to announce that we’re joining Spark Capital, GV, Sequoia Capital, Optum Ventures, BoxGroup, and Elad Gil in investing in Medallion.

The Time Has Come to Eliminate Inefficiencies in Clinician Operations

Poor incumbent offerings resulting in costly administrative hours, a lower barrier to adopt technology catalyzed by the pandemic, and the rise of telemedicine have created a massive opportunity for a modern provider management platform. 

Founded in 2020 by Derek Lo, Medallion empowers healthcare organizations to simplify, automate, and expedite their provider licensing and credentialing workflows. Medallion’s first product in the market was its state licensing solution, which providers leverage to become licensed in all 50 states. The offering supports all major provider types (MD, DO, RN, NP, PA, LCSW, etc.) and covers the complete licensing lifecycle (e.g form completion, source verification, status monitoring, automated renewals, etc.) Soon after, Medallion expanded into payer enrollment and credentialing, where Medallion helps providers enroll and contract with both commercial payers and public programs, like Medicare and Medicaid. Moreover, Medallion integrates directly with primary sources (FSMB, NPDB, OIG, SAM, NPPES, etc.) to automatically verify and monitor provider credentials. 

“Medallion’s mission from day one has been to enable continuous, cost-effective care to patients by combining an industry-leading team of healthcare operations experts with a modern, efficient, and powerful provider network platform that health systems, payors, and virtual care organizations can rely on,” – Derek Lo, founder and CEO of Medallion. 

The company has capitalized on these market tailwinds and realized tremendous growth. It’s estimated that the Medallion platform has saved over 250,000 hours of administrative work for leading healthcare organizations like Carbon Health, hims, Tia, Headspace Health, Oak Street Health, and hundreds more. Since Medallion’s Series B six months ago, the company has doubled its employees, grown its revenue by 2x, diversified its customer base, and expanded its leadership team with key hires. 

As healthcare organizations face increasing pressure to adopt technology, Salesforce Ventures sees a massive opportunity to build a next-generation software infrastructure for healthcare administration. We are thrilled to welcome Derek and the Medallion team to the Salesforce Ventures family!

Finally, the Sales Team Behind the Sales Team Gets Some Love

The sales cycle is evolving, yet again. The old model of taking the CIO to a steak dinner and pitching a high-level software solution has given way to bottoms-up sales, online content strategies and product-led growth. At the same time, product categories are getting more crowded and granular, multi-cloud architectures are getting more complex, and customers are getting more technical and data-driven. All of this is giving rise to a new, revenue-boosting position that until now has been largely unsung: the PreSales team.

The emerging role of PreSales is a hybrid of sales and product. It leans more technical than traditional sales roles and is sometimes called a sales engineer, sales architect, sales consultant, solutions architect, or PreSales engineer. This person steps into the sales flow at the early stages to give detailed product demos and explain to a sophisticated customer how their solution might fit into the customer’s existing architecture.

It’s time software caught up. At Salesforce Ventures, we are always looking to identify business processes that have not yet been improved by software. When we learned about Vivun, we were floored by the inefficiency of PreSales workflows and the rapid growth of this new category. Vivun is built on Salesforce and is available on the Salesforce AppExchange, where the company has a five-star rating. We partnered with Vivun in March 2021 when we invested in the company’s $35 million-Series B. As Vivun continued to gain traction and earn customer love, we eagerly continued to support the company. We are proud to announce today that Salesforce Ventures has led Vivun’s $75 million-Series C.

PreSales has quietly become one of the fastest-growing and largest roles in business. Vivun ran a LinkedIn query in March 2022 for companies with more than 50 employees and found that Sales, Marketing and PreSales had more professionals than did any other role. Sales counts 7.9 million jobs; Marketing has 4.1 million; PreSales has 1.8 million — nearly four times the number of people in customer success (500,000), another hot field. And yet, until Vivun, while there were thousands of apps for sales teams, there was not a single product targeting PreSales; their only tools were email and spreadsheets. “Technology providers had been so focused on sales, service, and marketing, yet the profession of PreSales was completely overlooked,” says Vivun CEO and Co-founder Matt Darrow.

Vivun sits between tools like Salesforce and Jira, enabling PreSales data and insights to help align the field and product teams

Matt Darrow and John Bruce are PreSales experts who were fed up with the vacancy of solutions. Darrow was VP of PreSales at Zuora and Bruce was VP of Worldwide Sales Engineering at SignalFX. Together they envisioned a centralized system-of-record for deals in the PreSales stage, as well as a platform to improve workflows.

“B2B selling is changing for good. Buyers want to get hands-on with solutions, do their homework on their terms, and engage with product experts when it’s convenient. This shift is creating explosive demand for the PreSales role. Once relegated to demo-wielding sales assistants, PreSales professionals are ascending to their rightful place within a B2B company: owning the buyer experience.”

— Matt Darrow, CEO and Co-founder, Vivun

In a crowded technology industry with decreasing product differentiation, buyers dig in deeper and ask more technical questions. Sales teams are adapting and becoming more specialized. Sales reps are now collaborating with technical experts from the start, as well as sharing accountability and fostering transparency.

Vivun makes it easy for PreSales teams to discover and qualify leads, educate buyers, prepare proposals and support buyers through their customer journey. It also provides a dedicated workspace to bring buyers and sellers closer together while encouraging transparency and collaboration.

Today’s buyer often asks for “off-menu” features that don’t yet exist. Keeping track of these requests, analyzing which ought to be the highest priority, and following up with interested buyers to let them know they’re available, is a complex task. Vivun gives PreSales the ability to scan hundreds of requests from buyers, make recommendations on which might deliver the highest return, and share insights with product developers.

From Highspot in enablement, Outreach in engagement, and Gong in intelligence, we at Salesforce Ventures are strong believers in the ability of software to empower companies to sell more while making the lives of sales personnel easier. Vivun has the potential to create and serve a new generation of technical sales professionals and improve the process for sellers and buyers alike. We’re proud to partner with Vivun on its mission to unlock the power of PreSales!

Read more about Vivun here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/17/vivun-is-digitizing-pre-sales-and-just-got-75m-in-new-investment/

WELCOME, BLOCKDAEMON!

Today we are excited to announce our investment in Blockdaemon, which powers the blockchain economy with an easy-to-use, secure, and scalable node management platform.

The problem

Institutions are increasingly interested in finding ways to leverage blockchain technology, however, they are unlikely to look to build or manage their own blockchain infrastructure — much like few businesses, today would choose to manage their own cloud infrastructure. Enter Blockdaemon.

Blockdaemon’s solution

Blockdaemon provides easy configuration, guaranteed uptime, around the clock coverage, and secure and compliant access to the blockchain ecosystem for institutional customers removing the need for institutions to stand up and manage their own node infrastructure, with a product suite that includes white-label validators for staking, dedicated node clusters and APIs for reading and writing transactions and querying data feeds.

Today, Blockdaemon is the largest institutional node operator, with over 40,000 nodes, and supports over 50 different protocols which include over 25 proof-of-stake protocols. Nodes are fundamental to the blockchain, acting as the network participants that transmit and collect information, as well as engaging with the creation of new blocks via proof-of-work (PoW) or proof-of-stake (PoS).

Blockdaemon leverages this node network to provide enterprise-grade staking-as-a-service. Blockdaemon’s staking solution allows customers to utilize their token holdings to receive rewards in exchange for acting as a validator on PoS networks. Given concerns around energy consumption and sustainability with PoW protocols, this additionally supports a more sustainable method of validation for the blockchain while earning yield.

Why we’re backing Blockdaemon

In spite of price volatility, the crypto market is booming and 2021 was a significant year in terms of adoption. The crypto market cap hit all-time highs of $2.8T in 2021 driven largely by growth Ethereum (ETH) and significant consumer adoption in NFTs and DeFi.

As we see more regulatory clarity around crypto and blockchain, we expect to see greater investment in and adoption of blockchain technology by enterprise and Blockdaemon stands to benefit. Indeed, in the financial sector alone, the use of blockchain is estimated to reach a value of $22.4B by 2026.

Today, Blockdaemon is supporting an impressive group of blockchain-native and traditional enterprise customers including BlockFi, Fireblocks, Revolut, and Citi. Customers are leveraging both the node management services as well as delegating digital assets to Blockdaemon for staking. This is driving incredible growth in Blockdaemon’s tokens under management and is averaging more than $10B in monthly staked assets. Over the past year alone, Blockdaemon has scaled dramatically with 12x revenue and 6x headcount.

​​In addition to the market opportunity and the product that Blockdaemon is building, we are thrilled to be backing CEO & Founder Konstantin Richter who has over 20 years of experience building technology businesses. Konstantin leveraged his experience running Ethereum nodes to build Blockdaemon, an infrastructure platform focused on catering to the blockchain. Additionally, his focus on building and scaling Blockdaemon with compliance as a priority is a long-term competitive advantage for the enterprise use case.

What’s ahead?

As adoption of blockchain technology continues to accelerate, Salesforce Ventures sees a large opportunity to build scaled businesses that provide the building blocks for enterprises to participate on the blockchain.

Today, Blockdaemon is a one-stop-shop for blockchain transactions, staking, and liquidity. Going forward, there is a huge opportunity to extend further into DeFi and other emerging services that support enterprises in all their interactions with the blockchain.

Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, Blockdaemon!

Technology

Modern Treasury: Improving the way businesses move and track money

Today, many companies throw people at the problem. They hire people to handle payments; engineers to build bank integrations; and finance people to send checks and wires, reconcile payments, and close the books each month. This poor experience is primarily driven by the infrastructure that facilitates these transactions, which is arcane, slow, mostly manual, and difficult to integrate into.

Despite this poor user experience, the volume and dollar value that moves through the ACH network is staggering. According to the National Automated Clearinghouse Association, the ACH network handled 29.1 billion payments in 2021, representing $73 trillion. Business transactions comprised 5.3 billion of those payments, representing a disproportionate $50 trillion in value — a 20% increase year-over-year. In addition, Fedwire, a real-time gross settlement system of central bank money used by Federal Reserve banks, estimates that 204.5 million transfers were initiated in 2021, representing $992 trillion.

Finally, an automated solution to payments

Modern Treasury automates much of the process of moving and tracking money for businesses. The company created an application programming interface, or API, which integrates with the banking system, and built software to make the tracking easier for finance and treasury teams. This automation enables companies to build and scale innovative products, manage payments via a dashboard, and automatically reconcile cash across multiple bank accounts.

Salesforce Ventures believes in modernizing outdated business infrastructure. That is why we are proud to announce that Salesforce Ventures is joining Altimeter Capital, Benchmark, Y Combinator, and SVB Capital in investing in Modern Treasury.

Modern Treasury was founded in 2018 by Dimitri Dadiomov (CEO), Sam Aarons (CTO), and Matt Marcus (CPO). The founders met at LendingHome, where they were responsible for the company’s payment operations. This included funding loans, collecting monthly payments, initiating investor deposits, handling transfers, and reconciling everything. Through their first-hand experience, they realized the inefficiency and waste of the manual and human-capital-intensive process of building tools to connect to banks, manage all of the money going out in the form of loans and coming back in monthly payments, and reconcile their books. When they began to see this as a universal problem, they recognized a massive opportunity and left to start Modern Treasury.

Today, Modern Treasury is one of the most innovative payments solutions on the market. The company brings a much-needed automated payment infrastructure to the business world. Its solution includes all the workflow around money movement to make those processes faster, more reliable, and more efficient.

The key enabler of the Modern Treasury product is its network of banks. The company has API connections with more than 25 banks today. By connecting to this network and providing a friendly user interface on top, they’re able to facilitate traditionally cumbersome processes like payment initiation, tracking and attributing sent and received funds, resolving payment failures and returns, and reconciling transactions to bank statements and the ledger.

Modern Treasury has capitalized on strong market tailwinds and achieved tremendous growth. Its customers reconcile more than $2.8 billion per month using the platform, up from $1 billion a year ago. Customers include fast-growing companies such as Gusto, TripActions, and Marqeta. Customers are driving more than $300 million in Real-Time Payments, or RTP, over the Modern Treasury platform per year. RTP is the first new payment rail in the U.S. in four decades.

We are thrilled to partner with Modern Treasury on their next chapter as they transform the way teams move and track money, catalyzing growth in the economy’s most important sectors, from real estate and healthcare to education and financial services. We hope you will join us in welcoming Modern Treasury to the Salesforce Ventures family!

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