American enterprise-software company, the global leader in customer-relationship management (CRM). Founded around 1999; its co-founder and boss is Marc Benioff. Roughly nine in ten Fortune 500 companies run Salesforce software.
Salesforce holds around 20% of the CRM market. In 2021 it bought Slack, a corporate-messaging platform, for $28bn. On May 27th 2025 it announced it would pay $8bn for Informatica, which designs tools to integrate and crunch corporate data, to support its Agentforce AI-agent platform. It also hired the team behind MoonHub, a recruitment-and-HR startup, in June 2025.
Salesforce piggybacks on "hyperscaler" cloud providers rather than building its own data-centre infrastructure. It excludes Microsoft, with which Benioff has a long-running feud. Its quarterly capital spending runs to around $150m-200m, a fraction of what Oracle spends.
Its sales passed those of SAP in 2023, though growth has since slowed while SAP's has accelerated.
In January 2025 Benioff said Salesforce would not add any more software engineers that year, citing productivity gains from AI tools.
In October 2025 Salesforce said it would not pay hackers demanding a ransom for customer data stolen earlier that year.
Together Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow and Workday generated almost $30bn in free cashflow in 2025. The big software firms have been on an AI acquisition spree: Workday bought Sana Labs, a Swedish AI startup, and ServiceNow bought MoveWorks, another AI firm.
"Irrationality is the square root of all evil"