Salesforce is doubling down on artificial intelligence by pouring another $500 million into its corporate venture fund, the company announced on Monday as it prepares to kickoff Dreamforce this week.
The company's venture arm, known as Salesforce Ventures, now has $1 billion for its generative AI investments, and its strategy will include a focus on looking for early-stage companies that are developing smaller models.
"What we want to focus on with the new funding is smaller models, case specific models… verticalized models," John Somorjai, Salesforce's chief of corporate development and investments, said during a press conference.
Somorjai acknowledged that the team is competing for competitive valuations.
"Valuations remain elevated for the best companies and our goal is to get into those companies as early as possible," Somorjai said.
He also told Forbes that the fund has already deployed its first $500 million across two dozen companies.
Those investments include Anthropic, Cohere, Runway, Hearth, You.com, TogetherAI, Mistral and Hugging Face. Salesforce Ventures was also an investor in Humane, the San Francisco startup designing a wearable AI "pin" that was widely panned as half-baked after its release, and it recently led a $70 million Series C funding for Second Front Systems, a provider of national security software.
"The AI landscape has evolved greatly in the past year, encompassing everything from powerful LLMs to business-boosting applications — yet no enterprise will adopt AI at scale unless they trust it will deliver strong returns and avoid putting their reputation at risk,” Salesforce Ventures managing partner Paul Drews said in a statement.
This year, Dreamforce is all about the continued opportunity and promise of AI.
Salesforce is using the annual conference to launch and push its newest product integration, called Agentforce, which allows companies to deploy automated bots and tasks built on top of their existing data and allow for guardrails to prevent unwanted outcomes.
Around 45,000 people are expected to attend the conference in-person this year.
Salesforce also plans to keep the conference in San Francisco for at least three more years if it feels confident that the city will be "a safe and secure environment" for the event, a Salesforce executive told SF Travel.
