“Values drive value” for Salesforce Ventures as AI investment ramps up

Salesforce Ventures has unveiled another $500 million AI investment fund, bringing its total funding for AI entrepreneurs to $1 billion – and the company is sharpening its focus on supporting 'ethical' startups, according to a senior company figure.

The expansion of the fund doubles down on its backing of high-growth companies operating in the AI industry. When it first launched, the AI fund initially set a pot of $250 million, but this was doubled within months amid rapid acceleration in the generative AI space.

To date, Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than two dozen companies, including some big names in the generative AI industry such as Cohere, Mistral, Hugging Face, and Anthropic.

In a press briefing with assembled media, Paul Drews, managing partner at Salesforce Ventures, said the rapid expansion of the fund has come in direct response to the significant growth seen across the AI industry over the 18 months.

“We were just blown away by the number of entrepreneurs we were meeting that were building generational businesses,” he told jouarnalists. “So given the pace at which we were seeing entrepreneurs investing, it made sense to increase that to $500 million.”

“It was a really good signal to entrepreneurs to show where we’re spending our time,” Drews added. “The vast majority of our time now is spent looking at enterprise AI and generative AI, and that’s one of the reasons we wanted to upsize the fund.”

Salesforce Ventures wants to back ‘ethical’ innovators

Anthropic is a notable success story as far as Salesforce Ventures’ portfolio goes.

The AI firm has grown rapidly in recent years, is a major partner for hyperscalers such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and even launched its own AI investment fund earlier this year.

Speaking to ITPro, Drews said a key factor in the decision to back Anthropic initially was that the company’s values aligned closely with those at Salesforce. This values-led approach to investment appears to be a common theme at the venture capital unit.

“We think it’s critically important to be investing in the most innovative companies out there, who are innovating in an ethical and responsible way,” Drews told ITPro.

“Since we launched our first generative AI fund, what we’ve seen in the market is we talk to CIOs in the industry, they’re really excited to adopt generative AI solutions, but they need those solutions to be secure, compliant, and be trusted.

“They want to make sure that the founders they’re potentially partnering with are innovating in that way. “

Anthropic’s ‘Constitutional AI’ approach, which values human oversight and the responsible development of large language models (LLMs), not only caught Salesforce’s attention, but has positioned it as a trusted firm.

With that in mind, it made perfect sense from both a business and cultural perspective to back the firm. Salesforce itself has been keen to frame itself as the go-to, trusted partner for enterprise AI over the last 18 months.

Dreamforce 2023, for example, saw the company focus heavily on promoting its Einstein Trust Layer and responsible approach to AI development.

During his keynote speech at last year’s conference, CEO Marc Benioff hit out at industry counterparts over a lax approach to safety and problems with model hallucinations.

“We like to say ‘values drive value’ - we don’t think that companies embedding ethics into what they’re doing slows them down, we actually think it can accelerate their adoption in the enterprise,” Drews told ITPro.