Salesforce Ventures Doubles Down On AI Investments

Three months after launching it, 鈥� 鈥檚 venture arm 鈥斅� announced it will double the size of its Generative AI Fund to $500 million.

In March, Salesforce Ventures聽1 said it would launch a new $250 million generative AI fund that will look at promising generative AI startups. The firm announced at TrailblazerDX it will initially invest in four AI companies 鈥� , , and .

Since then, the venture arm of the CRM giant also has made additional AI investments in and 鈥� and obviously see there is much more potential in AI than only $250 million can cover.

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鈥淲e are already seeing AI change the way the world works, and we鈥檙e excited to build on the momentum of our Generative AI Fund,鈥� , managing partner at Salesforce Ventures, said in a . 鈥淓xpanding our Generative AI Fund enables us to work with even more entrepreneurs who are accelerating the development of transformative AI solutions for the enterprise, and we are excited to support the next generation of innovative founders.鈥�

Corporate investments

Salesforce and Salesforce Ventures are among several big tech companies and corporate venture arms that have been placing AI bets for several years 鈥� although those deals have become more expensive.

Salesforce Ventures has taken part in more than 50 deals that involved AI-related startups since the start of 2019, per Crunchbase .

This year, the venture arm has made four deals, including participating in Anthropic鈥檚 recent big raise. It also took part in Cohere鈥檚 huge $250 million round.

Salesforce Ventures鈥� deals also show the rising price to invest in AI-related startups. While the venture arm made 10 investments in deals that totaled $736 million last year, the four deals this year have totaled $705 million.