Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2018: Meredith Finn

Meredith Finn, senior director at Salesforce Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of the cloud service provider, helped launch its $50m Impact fund last year and oversees it.

This was one of four funds it set up with an aggregate $250m committed for the ventures team that also saw three of its unicorn portfolio companies (private companies worth at least $1bn) going public.

And this was Finn’s biggest achievement. She said: “This year we publicly launched the Salesforce Impact Fund, which is a $50m fund focused on investing across four primary areas of impact: education and workforce development, equality and inclusion, sustainability, and social sector tech. We have already invested in 11 companies, including Andela, Angaza, Ellevest, Flutterwave, and Hustle.

“It has been an incredible experience to bring together our investment expertise and our corporate values.
I am excited about the overwhelmingly positive response we have received to launching the fund.

“I think we have an opportunity to continue to show that investing in great businesses that have a social mission has the potential to produce great returns. And, hopefully, the track record we are building will enable us to help other VCs and CVCs explore building impact into their investment programs.”

The largest of these four initiatives was the $100m Platform Fund the unit launched in May, followed by the SI Trailblazer Fund, to invest in cloud consulting companies looking to expand their Salesforce services, and the AI Innovation Fund in late September to support developers of Salesforce-compatible artificial intelligence software.

Finn had an active year in 2017 for deals, closing as investors rounds for Andela’s $40m C round, Hustle’s $8m A round, Conga’s undisclosed-sized round, CloudCraze’s $20m round at the start of last year, and Voicera’s $5.5m seed round. Her earlier portfolio companies have also broadly performed well, led by the $60m series F round for business planning platform Anaplan last month that valued it at $1.4bn.

After making the switch from corporate development to ventures in 2015, Finn’s other investments included Twilio, Pendo.io, Layer, MSG.ai, Optimizely, Cogito, Dispatch, Helpshift, Amplero and Simpplr.

While making more than five investments per year would be active for many venture investors, it underplays Finn’s activity. She said: “I have been with Salesforce Ventures for almost three years helping to lead investments across North America.

“During that time, I have had the pleasure to help invest in over 40 companies that stretch broadly across the enterprise software-as-a-service ecosystem.

“Salesforce Ventures is the strategic investment arm of Salesforce. We are focused on investing in early-stage software companies that are currently built, or have the potential to build, on our platform and partner Salesforce from a product perspective. We are primarily focused on investing in Series A & B companies. Salesforce has an active portfolio of over 200 companies across the enterprise SaaS space.”

However, this strategic focus can bring challenges. Finn said: “I am constantly trying to balance near-term versus long-term strategic value in evaluating companies for investment.

“We work very closely with our internal product teams at Salesforce, who by virtue of the demands of their jobs, tend to be more near- to medium-term focused. I believe, however, part of our role as CVCs is to make sure that we are helping the parent company to keep an eye on the long-term horizon.”

Finn’s experience as a senior associate at Hattery, following her MBA from Columbia Business School, as well as previous role as an associate at Evercore, after her economics degree from Harvard University, stood her in good stead before her operating roles on the west coast at both Google and Twitter.

She said: “I always wanted to be in venture capital to work alongside entrepreneurs to help build great businesses. Corporate venture capital was appealing because I believe CVCs have an extra set of tools in their toolkit to help accelerate the growth and development of the businesses they invest in.

“Through technology partnerships, co-marketing opportunities, and customer and capital introductions, I believe Salesforce has the potential to help drive additional value, beyond the checks we write, for our portfolio companies.”

Now, she has returned to her roots, having recently moved from San Francisco to New York City (where she is originally from), “so I have been spending a lot of time recently getting reacclimated to the east coast and building relationships here.

“I am incredibly excited about the tech scene in NY and the opportunities that are emerging here.”

Finn’s investments were made alongside some notable exits last year for Salesforce Ventures as a whole, particularly on the public markets. Integration software provider MuleSoft raised $221m when it floated in March, before data analytics software producer Alteryx went public in a $126m offering a few days later, and database platform creator MongoDB secured $192m from its October IPO.

A significant and perhaps telling indication of the strength of Salesforce Ventures’ investments is that not only did all three float above their ranges, their shares have all gone up in price since. Alteryx’s stock is up 81% from its IPO price to reach a $1.49bn market cap, while MuleSoft’s has risen 73% to take it to a $2.93bn valuation and MongoDB’s is 19% higher, allowing it to reach $1.43bn.

The corporate also secured some M&A exits during the year, even if they were not at the same level as the IPOs. McAfee acquired Skyhigh Networks, a cloud technology developer that had raised $105m in funding, in November after app development platform ManyWho and meeting management platform Do had been bought in March, by Dell and Amazon Web Services respectively.

As for 2018, it will be interesting to see whether Salesforce Ventures aims to invest more tightly within specialist funds and whether any of Finn’s portfolios mature to an exit. But Finn said: “My primary ambition is to continue to assist in helping to build great companies and building my reputation as a value-add investor.

“I would particularly love to see our impact investing program continue to grow and flourish both at Salesforce, but also among other VCs and CVCs.”