Salesforce

Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company based in San Francisco, California. It is best known for its customer relationship management software and other tools that help businesses manage their work online. These tools are offered through a subscription model, meaning customers pay regularly to use them.

The company was started by Marc Benioff, a former Oracle executive, in March 1999. It grew very fast and offered its shares to the public for the first time in 2004. Over the years, Salesforce has bought other companies, including Tableau and Slack, to add more features to its services.

As of March 2026, Salesforce’s value was around US$186 billion. In the fiscal year ending January 31, 2026, the company made a record $41.5 billion in sales. Today, Salesforce is part of important stock market groups, including the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 2020 and the S&P 500. Its tools are used by many businesses around the world to help with sales, customer service, marketing, online shopping, data analysis, and smart technologies.

History

Salesforce was started on March 8, 1999, by Marc Benioff, who used to work at Oracle, along with some friends. They wanted to create software that could be used online instead of having to install it on computers. Their first version of this online software was shown in November 1999.

Even though many tech companies struggled when the dot-com bubble burst, Salesforce kept going. They became well-known for saying "the end of software" and even hired actors to show this message at big tech events. Their money kept growing, from $5.4 million in 2000 to $22.4 million in 2001.

Salesforce held its first big meeting for users, called Dreamforce, in 2003 in San Francisco. In 2004, the company started selling its software to the public and made $110 million. Over the years, Salesforce added new tools to help companies with sales, customer service, and learning. In 2019, they bought a company called Tableau for $15.7 billion to help people understand data better.

In 2020, Salesforce joined a special group of big companies called the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company also bought Slack in 2020 for $27.7 billion to help companies communicate better.

Salesforce changed its official name to "Salesforce, Inc." in April 2022. Later that year, they started working with Meta Platforms to let people chat with companies using WhatsApp.

In January 2023, Salesforce had to let go of about 10% of its workers because they had hired too many people during the COVID-19 pandemic. They also closed some offices. In January 2024, they let go of 700 more workers worldwide.

Services

Salesforce offers many tools to help businesses connect with their customers. These include Sales Cloud for sales teams, Service Cloud for customer support, Marketing Cloud for advertising, Commerce Cloud for online shopping, and Platform for building new programs. They also have a tool called Slack for teamwork.

Salesforce has added smart tools using artificial intelligence. In 2023, they let businesses use a smart helper in Slack. Later, they created helpers to help with health tasks and customer service jobs, like handling returns. By 2024, they introduced chatbots that can chat inside their software to help customers.

Salesforce Platform lets developers create new programs that work with Salesforce. Users can find extra tools and services in the Salesforce AppExchange, an online store for business programs. Trailhead is a free learning site with classes about Salesforce tools.

In the past, Salesforce owned Desk.com for help desk support and Do.com for task management, but these are no longer offered.

Acquisitions

2006–2015

In 2006, Salesforce bought Sendia, a mobile web service company, for $15 million and Kieden, an online advertising company. In 2007, it bought Koral, a content management service. In 2008, Salesforce bought Instranet for $31.5 million. In 2010, Salesforce bought several companies, including Jigsaw, a cloud-based data service, for $142 million, Heroku, a Ruby application platform, for $212 million, and Activa Live Chat, a live chat software provider. In 2011, Salesforce bought Dimdim, a web conferencing platform, for $31 million, Radian6, a social media tracking company, for $340 million, and Rypple, a performance management software company. Rypple was later called Work.com in 2012. In 2012, Salesforce bought Buddy Media, a social media marketer, for $689 million, and GoInstant, a browser collaboration startup, for $70 million.

In 2013, Salesforce bought ExactTarget, an email marketer, for $2.5 billion. In 2014, Salesforce bought RelateIQ, a data company, for $390 million. In 2015, Salesforce bought several companies for undisclosed amounts, including Toopher, a mobile authentication company, Tempo, an AI calendar app, and MinHash, an AI platform. The company also bought SteelBrick, a software company, for $360 million.

2016–present

In 2016, Salesforce bought Demandware, a cloud-based provider of e-commerce services, for $2.8 billion and Quip, a word processing app, for $750 million. In 2017, the company bought Sequence, a user experience design agency. In 2018, Salesforce bought several companies, including MuleSoft, a cloud service company, for $6.5 billion, as well as Rebel, an email services provider, and Datorama, an AI marketing platform.

In 2019, Salesforce completed its purchase of analytics software company Tableau for $15.7 billion. Slack Technologies was bought for $27.7 billion in 2021. Salesforce also made smaller purchases between 2019 and 2021, including ClickSoftware for $1.35 billion, consulting firm Acumen Solutions for $570 million, CRM firm Vlocity for $1.33 billion, privacy compliance startup Phennecs for $16.5 million, and robotic process automation firm Servicetrace.

Salesforce bought Slack-bot maker Troops.ai in July 2022.

In September 2023, Salesforce bought Airkit.ai, a creator of AI-powered customer service applications and experiences. In December 2023, Salesforce bought Spiff, an automated commission management platform.

In September 2024, Salesforce bought data management firm Own for $1.9 billion, and enterprise management platform Zoomin. Salesforce also bought PredictSpring and Tenyx in 2024.

In June 2025, Salesforce announced plans to buy data management platform Informatica for approximately $8 billion. The deal improved Salesforce's data integration and governance capabilities. Earlier talks in 2024 failed due to disagreements over price and deal structure.

On November 18, 2025, Salesforce completed its purchase of Informatica for approximately $8 billion in equity value. The deal finished earlier than the original early-2026 target. By February 2026, Salesforce reported that Informatica had already started helping its financial results, including nearly $400 million in revenue during the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026.

Operations

Salesforce is based in San Francisco at the Salesforce Tower. The company has 110 offices around the world, including places like Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, London, Paris, Sydney, and Tokyo.

Standard & Poor's added Salesforce to the S&P 500 Index in September 2008. In August 2020, S&P Dow Jones Indices said Salesforce would join the Dow Jones Industrial Average, taking the place of ExxonMobil.

Salesforce’s culture is inspired by ‘Ohana’, a Hawaiian idea about family and community. The company tries to support its workers and everyone affected by its business.

In 2008, Salesforce changed its computer systems from Sun Fire E25K servers to Dell servers. In 2012, the company planned to build a data center in the UK, which opened in 2014. In 2016, Salesforce began using Amazon Web Services in some countries.

Cybersecurity incidents

2007 Phishing attack

In November 2007, a trick to get information from people led to some customer details being misused. Some customers got messages that looked like bills from Salesforce. An employee's details were taken by talking to people instead of a problem with the software itself.

2022 Heroku OAuth token theft (Salesforce subsidiary)

On April 13, 2022, a website told a part of Salesforce called Heroku about someone getting into their systems using a special code. Heroku quickly stopped the codes that were used and told customers to change their passwords.

2025-2026 ShinyHunters targeted campaigns against Salesforce

A group has done many big attacks to steal information and threaten Salesforce and many of its customers. Experts from Google, Salesforce, and a government agency noticed this.

• UNC6040 Modified Data Loader / Vishing - The group tricked employees into putting bad software on their computers. This bad software took details and let the group get into many places and take lots of information, which they then used to threaten organizations. Salesforce said this was because people were tricked, not because of a problem with their software.
• ShinyHunters/UNC6395 threat actors got special codes through connections with other software, letting them get into Salesforce for customers. Salesforce and the other software stopped these codes and took the software off until they could check more.
• ShinyHunters/UNC6395 threat actors also got special codes through another connection, letting them get into Salesforce for customers again. Salesforce and the other software stopped these connections until they could check more.
• Salesforce warned about problems with settings in their software. The group said they broke into about 400 companies and told Salesforce customers to pay or their information would be shared.

Controversies

In 2017, two Salesforce security engineers lost their jobs after giving a talk at a technology event about a special tool they made for testing computer security. The company had planned to share this tool but changed its mind and told the engineers to cancel their talk. They didn’t get the message in time and gave the talk anyway.

In 2018, a group that helps immigrants and refugees turned down a big donation from Salesforce. They did this because Salesforce worked with a government group that handles immigration, which didn’t match the group’s goal of supporting immigrant rights.

A report in 2019 showed that Salesforce didn’t pay any federal taxes on its profits in 2018, thanks to special rules in a new law and some tax credits.

In 2023, Salesforce had to let go of 8,000 employees because they had hired too many people during the time when many people were staying home. At the same time, it was reported that a famous actor, Matthew McConaughey, was being paid a lot of money to help promote the company.

In September 2025, Salesforce cut about 4,000 customer service jobs after introducing AI tools to help with customer support. The company’s leader said they needed fewer people because the AI could handle many of the tasks.

In February 2026, Salesforce announced more job cuts, affecting about 1,000 employees in different departments, including those working on new AI projects.

Also in February 2026, during a big company meeting, the CEO made some jokes about a government group that deals with immigration. This upset many employees, leading to discussions and some public reactions from other leaders in the company.

Salesforce Ventures

Salesforce Ventures began in 2009 when Salesforce started investing in new businesses. By August 2018, they had invested over $1 billion in 275 different companies. Some of these companies help with online sales, smart technology, stopping online fraud, and making work easier.

In 2021, these investments helped Salesforce gain $2.17 billion. By September 2024, Salesforce increased its fund for new technology companies to $1 billion. So far, Salesforce Ventures has put $5 billion into companies in 27 countries.

Office locations

Salesforce has many big offices around the world. Some of these offices are in San Francisco, Indianapolis, London, Sydney, Chicago, and New York in the US. They also have an office in Singapore.