There’s a $100 million (£65 million) coming the way of European business start-ups and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
The funding is coming from Salesforce, a cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company’s CEO, Marc Benioff, said Salesforce will invest in European enterprise start-ups through its Salesforce Ventures business.
John Somorjai, head of Salesforce Ventures, said: “There is so much incredible innovation happening in Europe today and we want to empower the next generation of enterprise cloud startups in the region. Our $100 million commitment strengthens our mission to help startups grow and give back to their communities“, Business Insider quotes.
In a discussion with Venturebeat, Somorjai said there has been a strong increase in the number of new businesses in Europe in the past 18 months. He believes greater government support and general startup encouragement are among the main factors for this change.
Ludovic Ulrich, head of startup relations at Salesforce, told Business Insider last month that Salesforce has been a “pretty active” investor in technology startups over the last five years.
“Salesforce Ventures are investing more in post Series A and being on the Salesforce platform is a very good plus,” he said at the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last month. “Usually we require companies to have a strong leading investor. It’s unusual that we would lead a round.”
Though its revenue comes from a customer relationship management (CRM) product, Salesforce also tries capitalizing on commercial applications of social networking through acquisition. As of 2015, it is one of the most highly valued American cloud computing companies with a market capitalization of $50 billion (£32.8bn).
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