Salesforce, Inc., is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, agentic AI, and application development.
Founded by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff in March 1999, Salesforce grew quickly, making its initial public offering in 2004. As of March 2026, Salesforce has a market capitalization of approximately US$186 billion.[2] For the full fiscal year 2026 (ending January 31, 2026), the company reported record annual revenue of $41.5 billion, a 10% increase year-over-year.[3] The company is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (since 2020) and the S&P 500.
History
Salesforce was founded on March 8, 1999, by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, together with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company.[4][5][6] The first prototype of Salesforce was launched in November 1999.[6]
Two of Salesforce's earliest investors were Larry Ellison, the co-founder and first CEO of Oracle, and Halsey Minor, the founder of CNET.[5]
Salesforce was severely affected by the dot-com bubble bursting at the beginning of the new millennium, resulting in the company laying off 20% of its workforce. Despite its losses, Salesforce continued strong during the early 2000s. Salesforce also gained notability during this period for its "the end of software" tagline and marketing campaign, and even hired actors to hold up signs with its slogan outside a Siebel Systems conference.[7] Salesforce's revenue continued to increase, moving from $5.4 million in 2000 to $22.4 million in 2001.[8][9]
In 2003, Salesforce held its first annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.[10] There were around 1,300 attendees and 50 exhibitors at the conference.[11]
In June 2004, the company had its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol CRM and raised US$110 million.[12][13] In 2006, Salesforce launched Idea Exchange, a platform that allows customers to connect with company product managers.[14]
In 2009, Salesforce passed $1 billion in annual revenue.[5] Also, in 2009, the company launched Service Cloud, an application that helps companies manage service conversations about their products and services.[15]
In 2014, the company released Trailhead, a free online learning platform.[16] In October 2014, Salesforce announced the development of its Customer Success Platform.[17] In September 2016, Salesforce announced the launch of Einstein, an artificial intelligence platform that supports several of Salesforce's cloud services.[18][19] Salesforce licensed the right to use Albert Einstein's image and likeness from the Einstein Estate under a 20-year agreement for $20 million, restricted to business software applications.[20]
Salesforce launched the Sustainability Cloud (Net Zero Cloud as of 2022), which is used by companies to track progress towards achieving their net zero emissions goals.[21]
Salesforce acquired the visual analytics and business intelligence software platform Tableau in August 2019 for $15.7 billion.
In 2020, Salesforce joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average, replacing energy giant and Standard Oil-descendant ExxonMobil.[22] Salesforce's ascension to the Dow Jones was concurrent with that of Amgen and Honeywell.[23] Because the Dow Jones factors its components by market price, Salesforce was the largest technology component of the index at its accession.[24]
Salesforce experienced significant leadership transitions between 2020 and 2021; Keith Block stepped down as co-CEO in February 2020,[25] leaving Marc Benioff as sole chairman and CEO.[26] In February 2021, Weaver, previously the chief legal officer, became CFO, where she served until stepping down in August 2024.[27] Former CFO Mark Hawkins announced that he would be retiring in October.[28][29] In November 2021, Bret Taylor was named vice chair and co-CEO of the company alongside Benioff.[30]
In December 2020, Salesforce announced its acquisition of Slack for $27.7 billion, the largest in company history;[31] the deal closed in July 2021.[32] The purchase price represented a 54% premium over Slack's closing market capitalization at the announcement date, valued at approximately $18 billion. Salesforce justified the premium based on anticipated synergies from integrating Slack's messaging platform with its CRM services.[33]
In April 2022, "Salesforce.com, Inc." changed its legal name to "Salesforce, Inc."[34]
In August 2022, Salesforce surpassed SAP in total revenue and market capitalization to become the world's largest enterprise applications software company, according to industry analysis.[35]
The next month, Salesforce announced a partnership with Meta Platforms. The deal called for Meta's consumer application WhatsApp to integrate Salesforce's Customer 360 platform to allow consumers to communicate with companies directly.[36]
In November 2022, Salesforce announced it would terminate some employees from its sales team.[37] That same month, Salesforce announced its co-CEO and vice chair, Bret Taylor, would be stepping down from his roles at the end of January 2023, with Benioff continuing to run the company and serve as board chair. Within the week, former Tableau CEO Mark Nelson and former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield also announced their departures. When asked about departures, Benioff stated, 'people come and people go.' Following these executive transitions, Salesforce's stock declined significantly, with market analysts attributing the decline to concerns about leadership stability and strategic continuity.[38][39][40][41]
In January 2023, the company announced a layoff of about 10%, or approximately 8,000 positions. According to Benioff, the company hired too aggressively during the COVID-19 pandemic and the increase in working from home led to the layoff. The company also reduced office space as part of the restructuring plan.[42] The same month brought an announcement from activist investor Elliott Management that it would acquire a "big stake" in the company.[43]
In January 2024, Salesforce announced it was laying off 700 employees (about 1%) of its global staff.[44]
In October 2025, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declared his avid support of Donald Trump and urged him to deploy the National Guard to San Francisco as Trump was deploying federal troops to other cities.[45] The comments generated significant controversy for Benioff and Salesforce,[46] including push-back from San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins[47] and the resignation of Ron Conway from the Salesforce Foundation board.[48] Benioff subsequently apologized for his National Guard comments.[49] That same month, Salesforce pitched the Trump administration on ways that Salesforce's AI tools could help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) triple its staff to support the administration's mass deportation campaign.[50]
Services
Salesforce offers several customer relationship management (CRM) services, including: Sales Cloud,[51] Service Cloud,[52] Marketing Cloud,[53] and Commerce Cloud and Platform.[53] Additional technologies include Slack.[54]
Other services include app creation, data integration and visualization, and training.[55]
Operations
Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower.[82] Salesforce has 110 offices, including offices in Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, London, Paris, Sydney and Tokyo.[83][84] Standard & Poor's added Salesforce to the S&P 500 Index in September 2008.[85] In August 2020, S&P Dow Jones Indices announced that Salesforce would replace ExxonMobil in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.[22]
Cybersecurity incidents
2007 Phishing attack
In November 2007, a phishing attack compromised contact information on a number of Salesforce customers. Some customers then received phishing emails that appeared to be invoices from Salesforce.[97][98] A Salesforce employee's credentials were stolen through social engineering. Salesforce stated the incident resulted from human manipulation rather than a software vulnerability in its platform.[97]
2022 Heroku OAuth token theft (Salesforce subsidiary)
On April 13, 2022, GitHub notified Heroku of unauthorized access to its systems through a compromised OAuth token. Heroku immediately revoked all affected tokens and notified customers to update their credentials.
Acquisitions
2006–2015
In 2006, Salesforce acquired Sendia, a mobile web service firm, for $15 million[120] and Kieden, an online advertising company.[121] In 2007, Koral, a content management service, was acquired.[122] In 2008, Salesforce acquired Instranet for $31.5 million.[123] In 2010, Salesforce acquired multiple companies, including Jigsaw, a cloud-based data service provider, for $142 million,[124] Heroku, a Ruby application platform-as-a-service, for $212 million,[125]
Controversies
‘Meatpistol’ presenters fired at Def Con
In 2017, two Salesforce security engineers were fired after giving a presentation at DEF CON discussing a Salesforce pentesting framework called MEATPISTOL.[163] MEATPISTOL was a Salesforce-developed exploit framework similar to (and named after) Metasploit. Salesforce had previously planned to open source the framework, but changed plans just before the presentation, and fired them immediately afterward[163] The presenters were sent a message half an hour before the presentation telling them to cancel the talk, but they did not see the message until afterward.[163][164] The terminated employees called on the company to open-source the software
Salesforce Ventures
In 2009, Salesforce began investing in startups.[180] These investments became Salesforce Ventures, headed by John Somorjai.[180][181] In September 2014, SFV set up Salesforce1 Fund, aimed at start-ups creating applications primarily for mobile phones.[182] In December 2018, Salesforce Ventures announced the launch of the Japan Trailblazer Fund, focused on Japanese startups.[183]
In August 2018, Salesforce Ventures reported investments totaling over $1 billion in 275 companies, including CloudCraze (e-commerce),[184] Figure Eight (artificial intelligence),[185]
Office locations
- Salesforce Tower (San Francisco, US)
- Salesforce Tower (Indianapolis, US)
- Heron Tower, 110 Bishopsgate (London, UK)
- Salesforce Tower (Sydney, AU)
- Salesforce Tower (Chicago, US)
- Salesforce Tower (New York, US)
- Salesforce Singapore[193]
External links
References
- Salesforce.com, Inc. - Salesforce Delivers Record Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2026 Results Salesforce, Salesforce, February 25, 2026^
- Salesforce: CRM Stock Price Quote & News Robinhood, retrieved March 6, 2026^
- Salesforce Delivers Record Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2026 Results