The CVC unit has formed a second $500m fund, having invested in two dozen artificial intelligence startups, including Anthropic, Mistral and Cohere, in the past 18 months.
US enterprise software producer Salesforce’s corporate venture arm doubled its capital commitment to $1bn yesterday, with the launch of a second $500m AI fund.
Salesforce Ventures initially launched a $250m Generative AI Fund in March 2023 before doubling its size to $500m two months later. It has backed some two dozen startups so far.
“Salesforce Ventures is a leader in helping startups scale market-changing innovations in the cloud, and we’re expanding on that heritage to bring the power of AI to all parts of the enterprise,” said Salesforce Ventures president John Somorjai, when announcing the fund.
“The first $500m we invested in this technology has powered growth across our AI ecosystem, and we’ll continue to incorporate learnings from across our business, partners and customers to help build the AI leaders of tomorrow.”
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The second fund follows strong performance from Salesforce Ventures’ first AI fund. Its portfolio includes Anthropic, which has more than quadrupled its valuation to nearly $19bn since the unit first invested, Mistral (valued at ($6bn), Cohere ($5.5bn), Hugging Face ($4.5bn) and Together AI ($1.2bn).
Salesforce made the move in advance of Dreamforce, a three-day conference billed as the largest AI event in the world, which it is preparing to open today.
The corporate has invested heavily in the area, and launched Agentforce, a selection of autonomous AI agents for the workplace it claims represents the third wave of AI, the next step from chatbots, last week.
