Salesforce Ventures, the company's venture capital arm, is launching a $250M fund to invest in startups working on generative AI technologies.
The fund, its largest to date, will initially invest in four AI-centric companies: Anthropic, Cohere, Hearth.AI, and You.com.
Each startup has shown "an ability to meaningfully transform application software and impact end users' workflows using responsible and trusted development processes," according to Salesforce Ventures.
- Anthropic is known for its conversational AI assistant, named Claude. Earlier this year, Google invested roughly $300M into Anthropic, which has so far raised over $1B.
- Cohere, which specializes in natural language processing (NLP) models for businesses, was previously in discussions to raise hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Hearth.AI said it's building products focused on "agentic relationship management."
- AI internet search engine You.com was co-founded by CEO Richard Socher, a former Salesforce EVP and a top AI researcher in natural language processing (NLP). The startup recently launched a chatbot that can generate text answers, videos, and other data in response to queries.
Salesforce Ventures said the new fund is intended to shore up the startup ecosystem and support the development of "responsible" generative AI technologies.
- The VC arm's prior investments have included Zoom, DocuSign, and Snowflake.
