Salesforce focuses on commitment to developers as it opens San Francisco startup hub
Salesforce announced $50m in funding in June, as well as its future plans to open a startup workplace in San Francisco. The company announced Tuesday the details for its new startup hub in San Francisco which will house 14 startups who will work from the space for five months apiece.
Salesforce focuses on commitment to developers as it opens San Francisco startup hub
"The first batch is customer service-focused, and includes companies at the prototype stage to those with lots of customer traction," Ludovic Ulrich, Salesforce's head of startup relations said. "The common denominator is obsession with customers."
The 14 companies chosen to help the company expand the role of developers within the Salesforce ecosystem include: Bud Mobile, CodeScience, Ideator, Kapuhonu, Keste, Leankor, Metadata, Nova, Sambuca, Propel, Proximity Insight, Quarrio, SpringML, and Wootric.
The space will be located in San Francisco SoMa (south of Market) district and will share a home with Salesforce properties: Heroku, Steelbrick and Salesforce IQ.
The startups that use the space won’t pay anything and Salesforce will not take an equity or investment from the startups. The only requirement for the 14 companies is that the company builds cloud software on top of Salesforce's app-building platform.
The startup incubator will provide a "workspace for select companies to innovate, collaborate, share best practices and interact with the Salesforce ecosystem. Paying homage to our roots as a SaaS pioneer, our first batch will focus on SaaS companies built utilizing the Salesforce App Cloud," according to the statement.
In July, Salesforce.com introduced a new e-commerce service after its $2.8 billion acquisition of Demandware Inc. that rivals products from competitors like Oracle Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. The Salesforce Commerce Cloud was created to help customers set up online stores and in-store tablets and kiosks.
It is also rumored that Salesforce is in the mix to purchase Twitter, as well as Google, after the social networking platform has been struggling citing slow user growth and poor revenue performance.
As well as talks around Twitter, Salesforce has been dabbling in the artificial intelligence area with the debut of Salesforce Einstein. This new product embeds AI capabilities into the Salesforce platform to bring customized experiences across sales, service, marketing and commerce to users.