Data is the Linchpin of Digital Transformation 2.0

Salesforce Ventures is doubling down on its position in Snowflake with another $250 million investment while continuing to invest in data-centric companies that are fueling the next generation of digital transformation.

Salesforce Ventures

September 18, 2020

If Digital Transformation is the act of modernizing your enterprise by converting old paper-based processes to smarter and more efficient cloud applications, Digital Transformation 2.0 is the act of securely and privately connecting the data from all of these digital processes to create a 360° view of your customer across all touchpoints and interactions. Digital Transformation 2.0 harnesses the power of data and unlocks the potential of artificial intelligence, business intelligence, and automation to deliver strategic insights that weren’t possible before.

Salesforce Ventures has been investing in companies that advance the next wave of digital transformation for some time, and our February investment in Snowflake, a cloud-based solution that breaks down data silos and enables cross-organizational data storage, sharing, and analysis, is a great example of that. We congratulate Snowflake on its achievements, including this week’s IPO.

We’re excited to share that in addition to our previous investment in the company, Salesforce Ventures has invested an additional $250 million in Snowflake.

This year, with so many things being upended, disrupted, and redefined, we’re seeing digital transformation happen much faster than we ever imagined. The pace of change is accelerating. Transitions we thought would take decades are happening right now.

Digital Transformation has clearly become an urgent imperative, and the next step, Digital Transformation 2.0 — leveraging the full value of customer data — is critical to its success.

We believe Snowflake is a foundational component of Digital Transformation 2.0. Last year the company brought on Frank Slootman, former CEO of ServiceNow and Data Domain, to be its CEO. Snowflake’s revenue for the six months ended July 31, 2020, jumped 133% from the year prior, to $242 million.* The eight-year-old company counts more than 3,100 customers, including Adobe, Capital One, and Sony. Customer satisfaction is incredibly high: Snowflake reports net retention of 158%* and a net promoter score of 71, which we believe is significantly above the industry average. (For more on our investment thesis and Snowflake, you can check out the post we wrote about our initial investment in the company here.)

To achieve the promise of Digital Transformation 2.0 and Customer 360, you need a holistic view of your customer data. In addition to warehousing data with Snowflake, Salesforce provides seamless enterprise integration with MuleSoft and business insights through Tableau, as well as Salesforce Ventures’ investments in Automation Anywhere, Alation, BigID, Privitar, Workato and more.

Last year, Salesforce Ventures invested in Automation Anywhere, which uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate specific tasks, such as managing invoices or populating data into Salesforce from other sources.

We’ve also invested in companies that help enterprises manage data at scale, such as Alation which allows data science, data engineering and analyst teams to structure and query data across different information sources within an enterprise, and Workato, which gives business users the power easily build workflows across all the silos where data resides.

Privacy and security are paramount when you’re sharing data across different apps and teams. To help enterprises rethink their approach to their most valuable assets — their data — we invested in Privitar, which makes it possible for organizations to protect and analyze their most sensitive data, and BigID, which automates data compliance and transforms how enterprises find, track, secure and govern their customer and employee data.

When all these apps come together, you can extract even more value from your existing apps. A business intelligence tool like Tableau, for example, becomes supercharged: Instead of a dashboard that represents specific parts of your business, such as your sales pipeline or the number of customer service cases, you can now see how your entire business is performing.

We believe the promise of Digital Transformation is more attainable than ever. Enterprises of all sizes can access high-performance software that helps ensure customer success at scale; enable richer collaboration between and within teams; draw insights from an endless stream of data; leverage machine learning; satisfy regulatory requirements; build predictive, personalized sales and marketing programs; amplify the power of their workforce, and keep global production and supply chains moving — all while seizing emerging opportunities in a rapidly changing environment.

Footnotes: *according to its S1. **as of July 31, 2020

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