Salesforce Pushes New $50 Million Venture Fund As It Shifts To ‘AI First’ Strategy

Leaning on developers to fuel the company’s future, Salesforce is rolling out a new $50 million venture fund, a Bay Area-based startup incubator to open later this year, and trumpeted recent acquisitions as key to an “artificial intelligence first” future.

“There’s something bigger happening: We are becoming an ‘AI-first’ company,” said Alex Dayan, chief product officer at Salesforce (NYSE: CRM)

CEO Mark Benioff, co-founder Parker Harris and other top Salesforce brass announced the plans at the company’s first entirely developer-focused event, called TrailheadDX, in San Francisco.

Salesforce’s developer community is ““Probably the fastest-growing developer community in the world right now,” said Benioff, citing 2.8 million developers building apps on the company’s platform.

In addition to toasting the company’s developer community, in a showcase that included dancing bear mascots, an application-themed musical revue, and a performance by Lenny Kravitz scheduled for Tuesday night, the company also unveiled a new $50 million development fund through its Salesforce Ventures investment wing. That fund is for developers building on Salesforce’s Lightning development platform, which the company overhauled earlier this year to make it easier to develop apps without an extensive code base.

Tuesday’s event was an extension of the company’s efforts to open up development in its ecosystem, broadening the playing field for anyone to build custom apps using its tools.

Both the $50 million fund and the planned incubator – which will open in the Bay Area by the end of 2016, the company says – are a “continuation of that ecosystem,” said Adam Seligman, GM of Saleforce’s app cloud. “It’s about bringing as much innovation to developers as we can, and I don’t think we can do that on our own.

Keeping both startups and developers in the fold is key to the company’s prospects.

“At our size, you always need to reinvent yourself,” Seligman added. “We’ve seen in our industry a lot of companies struggling to move to the cloud. That’s why staying connected to the ecosystem is so important.”

Salesforce has a track record of snapping up startups that its venture arm, or in some cases Benioff personally, has invested in: In the first quarter, the company spent $75 million on AI and machine learning startups and has demonstrated some speed in integrating the technologies into its existing product offerings. At the presentation Tuesday, Salesforce brass spotlighted the acquisitions the company has made in AI, machine learning and predictive analytics, demonstrating the integration of a Pinterest board into a Zillow application, toward the goal of offering better recommendations on home buying.

That integration was made possible through its acquisition of MetaMind, a deep learning startup, in April.

“The depth of our new AI capabilities, which can understand images, sentiment – that’s a huge next step,” said Benioff.

The company hasn’t indicated where in the Bay Area the new startup incubator will be located, but says that it will open by the end of 2016 as a “physical center of gravity for the Salesforce developer community,” the company wrote in a blog post.

“We’ll give you real estate, we’ll give you resources to build on this achievement,” said Benioff.

Source: San Francisco Business Times, Annie Gaus
Photo: Rank: No. 21, Large companies CEO: Marc Benioff Company: Salesforce Rating: 92% approval (Noah Berger, Bloomberg)