The Long Game: How Salesforce Ventures is Reimagining VC

Playing the long game alongside the most enterprising founders.

Paul Drews

November 20, 2024

What do you do during a recession when you see incredible businesses struggling to raise capital?

You launch a fund to invest in them, supporting the ecosystem and driving returns.

That was Marc Benioff and John Somorjai’s plan in 2009 when they founded Salesforce Ventures. In the beginning, it was just a mighty team of two with the goal of supporting enterprise SaaS businesses. 15 years later, Salesforce Ventures looks radically different.

What started as a team of two focused on strategic investments in AppExchange companies is now a thriving international team of 39 people with a mandate to generate top-tier venture returns. To date, our team has invested $6B+ into over 630 enterprise software businesses in 32 different countries.

The fund has grown from writing small checks to big ones.

From participating in rounds to leading them.

From keeping pace with the market to helping create it.

From the cloud computing revolution straight through the agentic AI age.

It’s fair to say we’ve covered a lot of ground in 15 years.

We’re proud of the foundation we’ve built by serving enterprising founders with the patient capital, coveted community, and unparalleled access they need to build industry-defining companies. And we’re excited to continue redefining the VC landscape by playing the long game alongside the next generation of enterprising founders.

We’re ready to chart a course for the next 15 years of Salesforce Ventures. But you don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been. So, before we blaze our trail to the future, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on our journey and what got us to where we are today.

Necessity is the mother of invention

Creating the VC that our community needed.

In the depths of the financial crisis, Salesforce was at a crossroads. Many of its AppExchange partners — critical to the company’s vision of a thriving, integrated ecosystem — were struggling to raise capital. Realizing that these were strong businesses and great investment opportunities, Marc Benioff and John Somorjai planted the seeds for what would become Salesforce Ventures.

Their vision was a venture capital fund that could provide capital AND a foundation of support for founders to enable their success. From these origins, we could’ve never imagined the success Salesforce Ventures has been fortunate to have. The world changed, and enterprises realized they could run their companies more efficiently by moving their systems to the cloud. Salesforce Ventures and the companies we backed in those early days benefited from this shift, and as the ecosystem of enterprise SaaS grew, so did the opportunity for Salesforce Ventures.

The new VC

Envisioning a new model for venture capital.

Venture capital has evolved from a niche, relationship-driven cottage industry to a multi-hundred-billion-dollar asset class. But many parts of the ecosystem have not kept pace with the needs of today’s founders. As VC scaled during a period of unprecedented economic growth, it became easy to simply make an investment, attend quarterly board meetings, and leave the hard work of scaling entirely to the entrepreneur. The firms that will thrive over the next 15 years are those that actively redefine the role of a VC — bringing not just individual expertise but the full power of their team and network to help founders succeed through every market cycle.

Salesforce Ventures embodies this shift, blending the singular focus of traditional VC with the stability, resources, and value-add from the pioneer in cloud computing. We’ve built a patient capital model, leading rounds from seed to growth with check sizes to match, from <$5M for a seed round to $50M+ for a growth-stage business. We support companies with a deliberate focus on long-term impact, and deliver our full team’s expertise. This approach ensures that founders can weather any market turbulence and scale sustainably, especially in transformative industries like AI, where companies need a new type of venture partner to help them navigate the most innovative technology period we’ve ever seen.

The new era of venture capital is here, and Salesforce Ventures is proud to lead the way into the next 15 years.

“Salesforce Ventures brings the best of both worlds. They offer the financial rigor and alignment with the founding team you’d expect from a traditional VC, but also the practical enterprise approach you get from a corporate investor.” – Clement Delangue, Co-Founder and CEO, Hugging Face

Powerful platform shifts

Invest in platform shifts early and often.

With few exceptions, our growth has been fueled by our ability to embrace major platform shifts early and take a long-term view. Over the past 15 years, our team has invested in many new technologies, from the emergence of the cloud in the late 2000s to agentic AI today. These major platform shifts often unlock transformative opportunities that redefine entire industries and create outlier value.

We believe AI is the next platform shift because of our experience across numerous technology cycles. As a force multiplier for companies and individuals, generative AI is primed to unlock new efficiencies across multiple industries and use cases. We are so convinced of AI’s potential to change the world that we’ve committed $1B to AI companies developing transformative and responsible AI solutions.

Our investments in the AI sector have also provided Salesforce with a window of innovation, helping fuel internal AI ambitions — culminating with the launch of AgentForce last month. The foundation for AgentForce was actually built at Airkit, an AI startup founded in 2017. Salesforce Ventures first invested in Airkit in 2020, Salesforce acquired Airkit in 2023, and Airkit’s Founder, Adam Evans, is now the EVP and GM of Salesforce AI.

Airkit is just one example of how we’re approaching this wave of AI innovation. Platform shifts like agentic AI embody the potential we seek in our investments to revolutionize businesses and empower customers in ways that create a better tomorrow.

“Of the large tech companies, we saw Salesforce and Salesforce Ventures moving faster than all the others. From Marc [Benioff] all the way down, it was clear their team saw AI coming and shifted their focus more quickly than others, and that impressed us.” – Neerav Kingsland, Head of Business Development, Anthropic

Values drive value

Why we’ll always be bullish on our values.

Salesforce Ventures has always been values-led, and we’re excited to continue this tradition long into the future. We lead with our values of courage, trust, equality, and mutual success because we believe success in venture capital should be about generating financial returns AND creating a better, more inclusive future.

Aligning purpose with profit is also good business.

It takes trust to serve portfolio companies with the value they need to accomplish their goals. It takes equality to foster the diversity of opinion necessary for high-quality decisions. It takes aligned incentives to achieve outcomes that aren’t just good for business but also good for the world. Most importantly, it takes courage to throw your support behind founders and ideas others might have overlooked or dismissed — but it’s where outlier value often accrues.

Our commitment to values manifests in our Impact Fund, whose portfolio companies facilitated $72.8M in grants and donations in 2023. They also manifest in our advocacy for responsible AI development, which aligns us with innovative AI companies like Anthropic, Hugging Face, Runway, and Together AI.

And leading with values encourages others to lead with theirs. As a founding member of Pledge 1%, Salesforce Ventures has helped over 150 portfolio companies donate 1% of their time, product, profits, or equity to beneficent causes of their choice, contributing over $2B in new philanthropy. By living our values today, we can ensure a more representative and equitable tomorrow — and we can inspire others to do the same.

“We have a shared vision that together, we can significantly impact the transparency, disclosure, and actions that companies take to accelerate the transition toward a 100% zero-carbon future. I think we’re better together as a result of it.” – Kiran Bhatraju, Founder and CEO, Arcadia

Provide a foundation for growth

Supporting founders requires more than just capital.

Since our inception, providing value to the startup community has been part of our DNA and a critical piece of how we show up for founders. We consider ourselves responsible for bridging gaps and providing guidance to founders working to reinvent how the world works. As our fund has evolved, we’ve strategically invested in formalizing our value-add capabilities to ensure we’re maximizing the impact on our portfolio.

Today, Salesforce Ventures boasts a mature Platform team spanning Financial Operations, Marketing, and Portfolio Development, through which we offer meaningful services to help catalyze growth and foster community across our portfolio companies and beyond. In practice, this means networking opportunities with colleagues and thought leaders, early product feedback from enterprise executives, strategic partnerships with Salesforce and our ecosystem of partners, customer introductions at Fortune 500 companies, access to our Innovation Advisory Board, and the credibility that comes from having Salesforce on your side.

Looking ahead, we remain deeply committed to expanding these resources and evolving our platform to meet the needs of founders at every stage of their journey, ensuring Salesforce Ventures continues to be an invaluable partner to founders at every stage of their growth journey.

“Salesforce Ventures is really unique in the value they bring to us in that they can really help to raise awareness of our solution on the global stage and help us to become a thought leader in our emerging industry.” – Sonia Kastner, Co-Founder & CEO, Pano AI

What’s Next?

We’re energized by the future.

What can you expect from Salesforce Ventures over the next 15 years?

A steadfast commitment to investing at the frontier of technology.

An unwavering dedication to amplifying our founders’ potential and advancing meaningful progress.

The same patient, thoughtful approach that supports founders throughout every market cycle.

And a beginner’s mind. If we’ve learned anything, it’s that the technology ecosystem is ever-changing, and we can only take credit for so much that’s happened these last 15 years. It’s the founders we’re fortunate to partner with who drive innovation forward. Our journey is the result of their effort, vision, and dedication combined with our team’s patience, support, and belief.

To our founders: Thank you for your trust, dedication, and ambition. If the next 15 years are anything like the last 15, there will be plenty more extraordinary things to come.

For more on the past, present, and future of Salesforce Ventures, download our new 15 Years of Salesforce Ventures Report >>>