Salesforce Quietly Backing Startups

Salesforce.com Inc. (NYSE:CRM) has quietly invested in several startups and wants to do more.

Practice Fusion, a San Francisco startup that develops free Web-based programs to help physicians manage their practices, announced Wednesday that it had secured a minority investment of less than $10 million from Salesforce.com, the first such deal to be publicly announced.

"We've made 5-10 similar investments in a wide variety of product categories to accelerate the types and kinds of applications available on Force.com, as well as the broader cloud computing eco-system," Clarence So, senior vice president of strategy at Salesforce.com, tells The Deal.

In some of the fundings, Salesforce.com has brought in VC firms to share the risk, but because Practice Fusion "didn't need much capital to get going, we shared the deal with a group of angel investors," says So. (Subscribers to The Deal Pipeline will find the names of the angels and other details of the deal.)

With nearly $1 billion in cash on the balance sheet, Salesforce.com expects investing in startups to be "an increasing area of focus for us," says So.

Will the company set up a venture capital unit, a la Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) new $100 million VC fund, Google Ventures?

"I don't think we'll hang out our shingle," says So. "That's more of a label than anything. But we are very open to entrepreneurs who want to approach us." - Mary Kathleen Flynn

Comments

[stink726:]

Thanks for the article.

Aug 10 03:27 PM