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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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.”
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.
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:
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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/
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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!
Technology
If you were unfamiliar with telehealth prior to the pandemic, you are likely familiar with it now. 2020 and 2021 saw massive increases in the adoption of telemedicine as the healthcare industry found itself turning to telemedicine to meet patient needs. More consumers than ever have tried telemedicine — a trend that is not going away any time soon.
In fact, as consumers and providers increasingly adopt telehealth solutions, McKinsey estimates that “up to $250B of current US healthcare spend could potentially be virtualized.” Yet, every digital health company, hospital, and insurer faces the same two obstacles: a need for more doctors and better technological infrastructure.
Enter Wheel: Wheel provides a white-label virtual care platform with an integrated nationwide clinician network. Wheel’s end-to-end solution allows companies to offer a virtual care offering quickly and less expensively.
Salesforce Ventures believes in the unbundling of the hospital and invests in the infrastructure to support that thesis. That is why we are proud to announce that Salesforce Ventures is joining Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tiger Global in investing in Wheel.
A pandemic-fueled macro backdrop, increasing focus on patient experience and access, and a burnt-out healthcare workforce have created the perfect storm for the rise of telehealth.
But creating a telehealth product overnight is not easy. Whether we are talking about direct-to-consumer, virtual-first care offerings building out their clinician networks, or legacy healthcare players racing to offer virtual care to patients — no matter who you are, building a virtual care offering takes time and money. And it is no surprise that we are seeing companies, like Cigna, acquiring telehealth providers, like MDLive — a trend we expect to continue.
Wheel was co-founded in 2018 by Michelle Davey, whose childhood spent in a rural community with few medical resources drove her desire to improve consumer access to healthcare. Her career was spent working in healthcare, tech, marketplaces, and virtual care, including impressive roles in recruiting and talent at Google. It was through those experiences that she saw the opportunity to build a new workforce structure in healthcare — Wheel.
Today, Wheel is one of the most innovative healthcare solutions on the market. They provide digital health companies, clinical lab networks, retailers, traditional healthcare providers, and tech companies an out-of-the-box virtual care experience under their brand. Offering virtual care across 50 states in real-time can be incredibly complex. Wheel’s platform simplifies the operational and regulatory complexities, enabling companies to offer virtual care faster and at a lower cost, with access to a nationwide clinician network. For clinicians, Wheel provides vetted telehealth opportunities and a central location to manage their practice.
“Telehealth 1.0 brought healthcare visits online but companies are still struggling to meet their patients’ care needs,” said Wheel CEO and founder Michelle Davey. “We recognized that to move the healthcare industry forward and truly deliver on the promise of virtual-first care, we need both the infrastructure and workforce that can deliver anytime, anywhere care. We’re excited to continue leading the charge and making personalized care a reality.”
The company has capitalized on telemedicine tailwinds and realized tremendous growth. In 2021, Wheel powered 1.3 million patient visits, a figure anticipated to grow 3x by the end of 2022. Not only that, in an industry swamped with burnout and workforce shortages, Wheel’s clinician network increased 60% YoY — impressive growth while bolstering a 90% clinician retention rate.
We couldn’t be more excited about Wheel and the tremendous journey in front of them. We’re thrilled to partner with Michelle and the entire team on the next chapter as they help fuel the next generation of healthcare. We hope you will join us in welcoming Wheel to the Salesforce Ventures family!
Technology
We all know “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Yet most software apps for knowledge workers only provide new ways to write and organize words — and little-to-no ability to collaborate visually.
This problem is particularly acute in the new era of distributed work. In the past, you gathered around a whiteboard in a conference room to brainstorm new ideas with your team. The group’s productivity was limited by the physical size of the whiteboard and whoever was in the room. Post-meeting, if you wanted to share your team’s work, all you could do was take a photo of the whiteboard. The old way of collaboration is static and limited by physical constraints and doesn’t work at all in our digital world.
Enter Miro, a visual collaboration platform for knowledge workers. Miro is a cloud-based digital canvas where you can co-create visually with your colleagues in real-time and asynchronously. Your team can use Miro to exchange ideas, make complex decisions, design products, and processes, host meetings, and gather and organize detailed feedback — all in a fun, accessible, interactive way. We are proud to announce that Salesforce Ventures is making a significant investment in Miro’s $400 million Series C fundraise.
This investment reflects our belief in the rise of the “Digital HQ” as the foundation of the future of work. It demonstrates our conviction that the future of the enterprise is collaborative — as evidenced by our earlier investments in collaboration software companies such as Airtable, Hopin, Monday, and Zoom. The collaboration software market is currently valued at $28 billion and is growing at a 15% CAGR. Last year, Keybanc published a survey in which 67% of CIOs said collaboration is their #1 budget priority.
At Salesforce Ventures, we believe visual collaboration will become one of the most important categories of enterprise software in the coming years as teams continue to look for ways to bring the interactive, visual elements of in-person teamwork into new hybrid environments.”Indicating this trend, Gartner reported a 10x increase in interest in visual collaboration over the past 18 months.
Miro has become the visual collaboration category leader thanks to its product-led growth strategy and easy-to-adopt nature. Initially gaining traction among designers, product managers, and engineers, Miro spreads virally in an organization as workers invite colleagues to collaborate. Sales teams host interactive meetings with customers on their Miro boards. Executives ideate on strategy and plan new projects. Learning and development teams create and deliver engaging interactive content.
Miro encourages multi-directional communication and is scalable to thousands of team members working together from anywhere, on any device. And Miro integrates with 100+ other tools, such as Airtable, Confluence, Jira, Monday, Office 365, Slack, Trello, and Zoom.
Since its April 2020 Series B, Miro has grown from five million users to more than 30 million. Its paying customers have increased by more than 550%, and Miro is now used by employees at 99% of Fortune 100 enterprises. Miro’s enterprise business has also shown significant growth and progress — the company now has 20 customers with contracts worth $1+ million in annual recurring revenue. Indeed, this is one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies we’ve come across.
What’s Miro’s secret? Customer love and community. The company’s founder and CEO, Andrey Khusid, is a product leader who guides the company toward delighting users through continued product iteration. For example, in recent months, Andrey and his team have added deeper functionality to facilitate new ways to run meetings in Miro with Smart Meetings, which includes chat, reactions (love those!), voting, and increased controls — all of which contribute to a more dynamic, inclusive, and interactive experience.
Miro is the highest-rated visual collaboration tool on G2 and its Net Promoter Score rivals much-loved consumer brands. The company created and fosters a community of its most passionate users. Dubbed “The Miroverse,” it gives users a sense of ownership of the product and has become an integral part of Miro’s organic growth. In the Miroverse, members advise and inspire each other, while also sharing templates (more than 1,000 so far) to help others quickly get up to speed and make new boards of their own.
Dual-headquartered in Amsterdam and San Francisco, Miro has assembled a global organization of more than 1,200 employees — a 5x increase in the last 24 months. Andrey and the “Mironeers” have built a world-class culture. The company earns high Glassdoor ratings: 92% of employees would recommend Miro to their friends.
We’re excited by the scale of the problem Miro solves, its product innovation, stellar hypergrowth execution, and amazing team. Miro’s story shows that great businesses can be built anywhere — unconstrained by borders or distance. We view Miro as a generational company that will disrupt collaboration in the enterprise for years to come.
Congratulations, Miro, and welcome to the Salesforce Ventures family!
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