Salesforce

What Salesforce is

Salesforce is an enterprise software company headquartered in San Francisco. It is best known for customer relationship management (CRM) software, which it delivers to customers as a subscription service rather than as a one-off licence purchase ^[1]. CRM software is the system a company uses to keep track of who its customers are, what has been discussed with them, and where each pending deal stands; selling it by subscription means customers pay regularly and the vendor keeps running and updating the software for them.

Founding

Salesforce was founded on 8 March 1999 in San Francisco by Marc Benioff, a former Oracle executive, together with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez ^[1]. Two of the company's earliest investors were Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, and Halsey Minor, founder of CNET ^[1]. Backing from people already established in enterprise software gave the young company capital and attention at a time when business software was still largely installed and maintained on customers' own machines.

Going public and buying its way into new markets

In June 2004 Salesforce held its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol CRM, raising $110 million ^[1]. The listing gave the company public capital and a public valuation to work with. Over the following years it grew partly by acquisition; its major acquisitions included the analytics company Tableau and the workplace messaging company Slack ^[1]. Buying established products let Salesforce add categories of software — data visualisation and day-to-day collaboration among them — to a business that had started with sales software.

The AI push

Salesforce now describes itself as the world's number one AI CRM, and it sells agentic AI products including Agentforce, Data Cloud, MuleSoft and Tableau ^[2]. "Agentic" here refers to software that is meant to carry out steps of a task on its own rather than only answer a question. The company has continued to buy capability as well: in May 2025 it agreed to acquire Informatica for approximately $8 billion, and the acquisition was completed in November 2025 ^[1].

Scale today

For fiscal year 2026, which ended on 31 January 2026, Salesforce reported record annual revenue of $41.5 billion ^[1]. As of March 2026 the company had a market capitalisation of approximately $186 billion ^[1]. It has been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 2020, and is also a component of the S&P 500 ^[1].

Why it matters

Salesforce is a useful case for understanding how business software changed. A company founded in 1999 by four people, selling software that customers rent month by month instead of installing themselves, ended up as one of the standard names in the industry and as a member of the main US stock indices ^[1]. Its later history also shows a second pattern common among large software firms: when a new layer of technology arrives — analytics, collaboration, and now AI agents — the company builds some of it and buys some of it, extending the original CRM business into a broader platform ^[1][2].