You basically invest now with almost like $1,000,000,000 capital play with off balance sheet from Salesforce. Right. And you're looking for things to add to what Marc Benioff was just talking about, Right? You're looking for the next frontier of an actual Gen Z tool. Exactly. So we feel that AI is one of the most significant innovations in our lifetime. And we're looking for entrepreneurs who are helping to solve business challenges in unprecedented ways that AI allows them to do so. And last year we announced a $500 million fund. We invested in 24 companies with that money, and we decided to expand that to up to $1,000,000,000 now to invest in this very exciting AI innovation. We just listened to Marc Benioff talk about why Salesforce is generative. Our offering is better than any company of any size engaging with the GPU provider right through to application layer. And it sounds like they're pretty happy with what they've got to offer.

So how can you go and find something new that Salesforce doesn't already have? Well, we're seeing interesting companies develop new business applications that are in new areas, like, for example, we invest in a company called Runway. And if you're familiar with the Oscar award-winning film, everything Everywhere, all at once. They used runway technology to take their editing staff from, you know, normally hundreds of people editing this very complex movie down to a handful of people using their technology. And this is real productivity value that's being delivered. We're seeing interesting developments in new models and new vertical applications in AI security in areas that we do not cover today, but we want to partner with these companies and deliver more solutions to our customers. You're not Anthropic. You're not listed as one of the wannabes in OpenAI. Why not? So we partner with both OpenAI and Anthropic and a number of other LEM

providers. We also have our own labs as well as large language models, and we are very excited about what we've invested in with Anthropic. We are in Hugging Face, which is an open-source provider of models. And we're also in Mistral, which is another provider. And so we feel pretty good about the investments that we've made at the foundational model level. And now we're looking to invest in different types of companies with this new $500 million fund. What's so interesting is four of Salesforce's last five acquisitions have been funded at some point by Salesforce Ventures. How much do you end up realizing you should buy these companies, not just strategically invest in them? Well, one of the benefits of investing in a company first is that you do get a chance to work with them and see how the technology can help deliver success to your customers. And we do partner very, very well with a

lot of the companies that we invest in. But keep in mind, we've made investments in over 630 companies over the past 15 years. We've only acquired 20 of the companies that we've invested in. So it's a very small minority of the businesses that we've invested in. But we're very excited about some of the recent acquisitions we've made out of the fund, like Spiff, which do an incentive compensation management, and Arket, which is a big foundational element of our agent force technology. We acquired them last year. Adam Evans, the founder of Arket, is a two-time boomerang back to Salesforce, so we're really excited to have him. John Tens of thousands of people have descended on our city for Dreamforce. So exciting. I've always thought about it as a customer event. I know loads of people that either work at Salesforce, MuleSoft, or they use CRM right historically for you.

What's the week been like in terms of unearthing interesting founders, interesting startups that you might write a check for? I think this week is one of the most exciting weeks I've ever been in San Francisco. The energy in the city is really palpable, and you're seeing CIOs and C-suite executives meeting with entrepreneurs at Dreamforce together all at Mosconi Center. We had over 45,000 people in person. And from my perspective, I got to say, the traffic was dreadful last night, very much from my perspective. I got to meet with some fascinating founders who are really redefining the way A.I. is going to work in the future and solving critical business challenges. So I'm very excited about what I saw this week.

Salesforce Ventures' New $500M AI Fund

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Salesforce Ventures' New $500M AI Fund

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