Salesforce Ventures Doubles AI Fund to $1 Billion, Signaling Strong Commitment to AI Innovation

Salesforce Ventures ups its AI fund to $1 billion, doubling it again

As part of Salesforce's massive tech conference, Dreamforce, taking place this week in San Francisco, its VC arm, Salesforce Ventures just announced a new $500 million fund dedicated to AI companies. This is significant for several reasons. First, in June 2023, Salesforce Ventures doubled its AI fund from $250 to $500, so the additional $500 million brings the AI fund to $1 billion. This compares to $5 billion total deployed in its first 15 years, since its 2009 launch. Salesforce Ventures is also among the forces making San Francisco such a hotspot for AI companies that startups worldwide are relocating to the city. Like many VC firms, for example, the venture arm hosts dinners for its portfolio companies and Fortune 500 executives (aka prospective customers). Not surprisingly, perhaps, its AI portfolio is already notable, including Anthropic, Hugging Face, Runway, and TogetherAI, among others.

Salesforce Ventures Doubles Down Again On AI

The investment arm of the tech giant announced a new $500 million AI fund -- which is in addition to its AI fund announced last year. In March 2023, Salesforce Ventures said it would launch a new $250 million generative AI fund that will look at promising generative AI startups. The firm announced at its TrailblazerDX event it would initially invest in four AI companies -- Anthropic, Cohere, Hearth.AI and you.com. Just three months later it announced it would double the size of its AI Fund to $500 million. The latest fund once again shows investors' -- especially corporations' -- insatiable appetite for all things AI. While venture funding scuffled in August, AI led all sectors in capital raised -- with startups raising $4.3 billion, or around 24% of total venture funding, per Crunchbase data. Salesforce Ventures has helped those numbers. Just last month it invested into the likes of Ensemble AI and Protect AI. In total, the investment arm has taken part in 10 deals involving AI-related companies, per Crunchbase data. Salesforce Ventures wasn't the only firm with fund news early this week. Private equity firm Insight Partners is close to closing a new $10 billion-plus fund -- roughly half the amount originally targeted, the Financial Times reported. The fund may end up being closer to $12 billion, per the report. Insight has been in the news recently thanks to a pair of exits. Just last week, credit card giant Mastercard agreed to buy threat intelligence company Recorded Future from Insight Partners for $2.65 billion. The deal represents a nice return for the private equity firm, which bought the startup in 2019 for $780 million. The week before, another portfolio company, Own, was sold to Salesforce for $1.9 billion.