Critics say Salesforce has stopped innovating.
They are quick to point out that Hubspot ships fast.
Well, Salesforce Ventures made 282 investments in the last three years.
THIS is how behemoths drive innovation.
Salesforce Ventures is one of the largest Corporate Venture Arms.
• They have made 635 investments in 10 years.
• On March 7, 2023, they launched a $250m Generative AI Fund.
• This is 2.5x larger than their $100m Impact Fund II (October 2020).
Some of their investments are riskier moonshots - bets on the future.
Others are calculated, highly strategic moves - a way to tip the scale in favor of Salesforce and benefit the $200B mothership:
👉 Invest in Salesforce Partners they desperately need
👉 Invest in strategic vendors like Snowflake, Tanium, and Qualified
👉 Or invest to ensure the products Salesforce Customers need are getting built - think Copado, Logik, Gong, or OwnBackup
Last week, Salesforce Ventures invested in Airspeed's Seed Round.
Early-stage investments doesn’t tend to be their style.
But Airspeed’s Founder & CEO is the former GM of Sales Cloud.
It presents an intriguing early-stage bet for 2 reasons.
1️. Airspeed is a suite of team-building apps, largely built on Slack.
Salesforce is very motivated to continue evolving the Slack roadmap and enhancing the overall product utility.
2️. Salesforce touches most areas of the Enterprise Technology stack - a big exception being HCM and HR tooling.
And an employee experience platform built around Slack could have legs …
Salesforce cultivated an ecosystem that builds for THEIR Customers.
It started with the AppExchange.
And continues with every dollar invested by Salesforce Ventures.
This is how they will continue to dominate.
