Salesforce Attempts Informatica Acquisition, Invests in 3 AI Startups, and More.

Background

Salesforce acquired Mulesoft in 2018 for $6.5B. It was a strategic move to streamline API-led connectivity and integration.

It’s great at connecting systems and unifying data from varied sources, a pre-requisite for the needs of AI adoption.

But it only addresses part of the challenge.

The big challenge now is around DATA QUALITY.

In the most recent attempt, Salesforce sought to fill that gap by acquiring Informatica.

Reports of an $11B+ acquisition surfaced a few weeks ago and this would have been a massive asset to Salesforce.

The reason is simple. AI requires more than just the seamless movement of data. You need high-quality, well-governed data.

• Mulesoft is an Integration Platform.
• Informatica is an ETL Tool: Extract, Transform, Load.
  

And ETL is essential to accurately feed large data volumes into AI models.

So, while Mulesoft moves data extremely well, you need a tool like Informatica to handle data cleansing, profiling, cataloguing, and metadata management.

Unfortunately, disagreement on price seems to have derailed any acquisition.

Recent Salesforce Ventures Investments in AI

In addition to the Informatica play, Salesforce Ventures is all eyes on AI.

The last 3 SFVC investments have all centered around AI:

1. Atlan: SFVC led the $27.5m Series B (Mar 2024)This is a “modern data collaboration workspace” like GitHub for Engineering or Figma for Design.It’s a virtual hub for data assets enabling collaboration across the data stack with tools like Slack, Snowflake, Redshift, Looker, Sisense, Tableau, and more.
2. Together AI: SFVC led the $106m Series B (Mar 2024)This is a platform for constructing open-source generative AI models.Developers and researchers at companies are empowered to train, refine, and deploy generative AI models.
3. primeNumber: SFVC participated in the $13m Venture Round (Apr 2024)A Japanese-based data integration service enabling engineers to automate the data acquisition process.

This is EXACTLY what we need to see from Salesforce. They have one of the largest Enterprise SaaS customer bases in the world, market penetration across every single vertical, and an unmatched volume of data cumulatively living in Salesforce.

Now, it’s about identifying and integrating the missing pieces.