Salesforce Commits to Invest $500M in Generative AI Startups

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Proving that it is forever playing in the generative AI race, Salesforce today announced it is increasing its Generative AI Fund, the company’s Salesforce Ventures VC support start-ups portion of the company developing “Responsible Generative AI,” from $ 250 million to $500 million.

In a candid statement, Paul Drews, managing partner at Salesforce Ventures, said the expansion would allow Salesforce to “work with even more entrepreneurs … accelerating the development of transformative AI solutions for the business.”

“We are already seeing AI change the way the world works and were excited to build on the momentum from our Generative AI fund,” continued Drews. “We are excited to support the next generation of innovative founders.”

Launched in March, the Generative AI Fund has already invested in several companies at the forefront of generative AI technology, including Cohere, Anthropic, You.com, Hearth.AI and new additions Humane and Tribble. While it’s far from the only fund investing primarily in generative AI, Salesforce aims to differentiate its tranche by prioritizing what it describes as “ethical” AI technologies.

For example, go-to-market function automation platform Tribble recently partnered with Private AI, a privacy-focused AI company, to use Private GPT, a product that blacks out personally identifiable information before sending it over the OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.

The Generative AI Fund is also distinguished by the wide range of technologies it funds. Humane, for example, is building a wearable, screenless AI assistant, while You.com hosts an AI-powered search engine with generative art and text tools.

Salesforce Ventures has a number of specific vertical investment funds, including funds targeting particular geographies such as Japan or Canada and a dedicated AI fund. But the Generative AI Fund is among the largest tranches of the VC arm to date; previous funds ranged from $50 million to $125 million.

The Generative AI Fund’s expansion coincides with the debut of Salesforce’s AI for Impact Accelerator, the company’s second accelerator program. AI for Impact will grant $2 million to a cohort of education, workforce and climate organizations to “promote the fair and ethical use of trusted AI.”

“AI for Impact aims to close the AI ​​access gap by providing flexible funding, expertise and pro-bono technology to targeted organizations, enabling them to accelerate AI-powered generative solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges,” he said Salesforce in a press release publication. “AI for impact [is a] philanthropic initiative to help purpose-driven organizations gain equitable access to trusted generative AI technologies.

Bloomberg notes that investments by Salesforce accelerators and funds could become more important to the company’s bottom line as activist investors, such as Elliott Management, discourage large acquisitions. To date, Salesforce Ventures, one of the most active corporate VCs in recent years, has participated in over 140 deals for AI and machine learning startups, particularly in the areas of AI insights for sales, natural language chatbots for service requests, targeted marketing content and personalized e-commerce experiences.

Generative AI, assuming it lives up to the hype, could be a huge market opportunity. Grand View Research predicts the industry could be worth an estimated $109 billion by 2030.

The C-suite in particular expects generative AI to have a huge impact on business. According to a recent survey by KPMG, nearly two-thirds (65%) of executives believe that Generative AI will have a “high” or “extremely high” impact on their organization in the next three to five years, far above any other emerging technology.

In addition to the Generative AI Fund and AI for Impact, Salesforce is investing internally in generative AI technologies, piloting tools like EinsteinGPT (which allows Salesforce customers to ask questions about Salesforce content and services) and SlackGPT (which answers questions in natural language on Slack content). Additionally, Salesforce previewed the ability to create landing pages on the fly, compose sales emails, and write code in Apex, Salesforce’s programming language, to programmatically trigger certain actions in a workflow, including the other activities.

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