Salesforce, Inc – History

Salesforce was initially founded in 1999 by Oracle executives Marc Benioff, along with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez. Initially, Salesforce was designed as a software as a service (SaaS) company and it gained funding from entrepreneurs like Larry Ellison and Halsey Minor. Salesforce filed for IPO in 2004 on the New York stock exchange and it raised more than 100 million dollars.

In 2006, Salesforce launched a special platform called IdeaExchange that allows customers to connect with various businesses for their products and services. Later on, in 2009 it surpassed the revenue of 1 billion dollars by launching its Service Cloud which allows companies to use Salesforce’s cloud computing tools. By 2014, Salesforce was working on the development of its customer rating management software along with its cloud-based software. Later, in September 2016, Salesforce launched Einstein which was an artificial intelligence platform for Salesforce cloud computing devices.

In February 2020, Salesforce co-chief executive Keith Block stepped down from the company and Marc Benioff remained in the position of co-chief executive officer and chairman of Salesforce. On December 1, 2020, Salesforce officially announced that it would acquire the company Slack Technologies for over 27.7 billion dollars. Slack Technology is a messaging platform for professionals working in a company.

By November 2021, Bret Taylor became the vice president and co-chief executive officer of the company. Between April and May 2022, Salesforce acquired multiple companies like Phennecs which is a sandbox privacy startup, Troops.ai which is a bot-making platform for Slack and it also announced its sponsorship for Formula 1 races.

Salesforce Inc is a popular American multinational company that is known for its cloud-based software products. It is currently headquartered in San Francisco, California and it employs more than 77,0000 people across the world. Salesforce is one of the most popular companies which is famous for its customer relationship management (CRM) software that allows its employees to focus on customer services, market analytics, automation, product sales, and application development.

Salesforce is mainly focusing on three types of products namely cloud computing, customer consulting, and enterprise software. Salesforce is also listed on the NYSE stock market and S&P 500. It is a publicly-traded company. 

Marc Benioff is the Chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce and Bret-Taylor is the vice-chairman and co-CEO of the company. Salesforce owns multiple subsidiary companies like: 

• Slack Technologies, 
• Quip, 
• Tableau Software, 
• MuleSoft, 
• Heroku, etc. 

Salesforce recorded revenue of more than 21.25 billion dollars in the fiscal year 2021.