If one thing has marked out Salesforce Ventures as a corporate venture unit under John Somorjai, it has been a willingness to go into new areas quickly. That was clearly shown last June when it doubled the size of its generative AI fund to $500m.
The move came just three months after Salesforce Ventures launched the fund, and the unit has emerged as one of the most active investors in generative AI, adding Runway, Typeface and Hugging Face to fellow AI unicorns Cohere and Anthropic.
Somorjai has led Salesforce Ventures, which bills itself as the second most active corporate venture programme worldwide, as president since it began investing 15 years ago.
Somorjai has led Salesforce Ventures, which bills itself as the second most active corporate venture programme worldwide, as president since it began investing 15 years ago. In 2023, he was promoted from executive vice president of corporate development to chief corporate development and investments officer.
As part of his duties, Somorjai oversees the group’s M&A transactions, with acquisitions in the past year including sales compensation platform Spiff and low-code app development platform Airkit, both Salesforce Ventures portfolio companies.
The move into gen AI is the latest in a series of specialist investment vehicles for the US-based unit, which had already formed regional funds for Europe, India, Australia and Canada in addition to two Impact Funds. Its 39-person team includes staff it absorbed from fellow CVC unit Slack Fund, now a subsidiary.
Salesforce Ventures’ overall investment tops $5bn and its 150+ exits include the likes of Dropbox, Twilio and Zoom, three of around a dozen cloud-focused portfolio companies to have formed their own CVC funds. The heads of two of them, Databricks and Snowflake, can be seen in this year’s Powerlist.
Prior to joining Salesforce in 2005, Somorjai was VP of business development for Ingenio, up to its acquisition by AT&T. He also spent four years on the board of the National Venture Capital Association up to 2021.
The Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist represents the 100
individuals spearheading the future of the corporate venturing industry.
These individuals excel in terms of their venturing approach and structure, number and quality of portfolio companies and in their contributions to the corporate venturing profession.