Salesforce Ventures

Today Lovable raised a $400M Series C that values the business at over $13B. One man who has had a front row seat to this remarkable journey is CFO Andy T.. “This team in Stockholm moves at a pace you’ve probably not seen before," Andy told our Nowi Kallen in a recent interview. In honor of Lovable's Series C, today we're sharing what Andy has learned from his time with the Lovable team about startup speed, velocity, and how AI is allowing teams to "catch all the rabbits." 🎉 Congrats to Andy, Anton Osika, Fabian Hedin, and the entire Lovable team on today's milestone. Salesforce Ventures is proud to be partnered with you on this journey. https://lnkd.in/ge-Gv3m2

Made my TV debut yesterday, joining Dani Burger on Bloomberg Deals alongside Julia Moore and Daniel Docter to discuss where capital is flowing across the AI landscape. Tremendous tailwinds in AI are allowing today's startups to achieve product and commercial milestones faster than any generation of startups before them – accelerating the pace of venture dealmaking like never before. My panelists might not completely agree with me, but a few things I have a ton of conviction on from our conversation: 🌟 Valuation vs. Quality: While top-tier startups command premium valuations (historically or in this new AI era), betting on visionary founders building generational technology makes backing the best teams well worth it. 🌟 The Shift to Physical AI: At Salesforce Ventures, we've spent the last 4 years investing across the AI infrastructure layer by backing leaders like Anthropic, Together AI, Crusoe, ElevenLabs, and Runway. Looking ahead, we think bringing AI into the physical world is the next most important thing – through investing in robotics pioneers such as Mind Robotics, Physical Intelligence and beyond. 🌟 The Enterprise Advantage: As venture dealmaking speeds up and becomes more competitive, our secret sauce remains leveraging our extensive global customer base through Salesforce to pressure test products and help our founders scale faster. In a fast-moving market, our strategy remains clear: providing patient capital, customer connectivity, and long-term partnership to help enterprise founders define the future. Check out the full Bloomberg Deals segment here: https://lnkd.in/dJSyqN-r

Base Power Company just raised a $1B Series D and launched Core, one of the largest home batteries on the market, designed and built in the U.S. We're excited to be re-investing in this round. Our thesis hasn't changed: The U.S. grid needs new capacity, fast, and Base is building it home by home. Since our initial investment, the team has scaled its battery fleet past 500 MWh, expanded from Texas into Illinois, and struck utility partnerships with Austin Energy, El Paso Electric, and CoServ for 200+ MW of capacity. Core takes that further — a 39.2 kWh / 78.4 kWh battery built at Base's own factory in Austin, engineered for grid support and installed in under an hour. Congrats to Zach Dell, Justin Lopas, and the whole Base team. Proud to keep backing this mission.

Salesforce Ventures is proud to join Antora Energy's Series C 🔋 Growing demand across AI infrastructure, heavy industry, and electric transport is bottlenecked by one thing: reliable, around-the-clock power. New gas plants and grid interconnections take 5-7 years to come online. The grid simply can't keep up. Antora is building a new tool for the energy stack. Their thermal batteries store low-cost electricity as heat in solid carbon blocks — heated to more than 2,000°C — and release it around the clock as steam for industrial processes or electricity for data centers and the grid. What makes Antora different: carbon is roughly a tenth the cost of lithium-ion battery materials, holds four times as much energy in the same space, and doesn't depend on the mined-mineral supply chains that constrain lithium-ion at scale. The proof is already in the ground. Their first giga-scale deployment, a 5GWh system in South Dakota, went from an empty lot to delivering 24/7 energy to ethanol producer POET in under a year. That's one of the largest batteries in the world, deployed at a speed that almost no energy technology has matched. We're proud to back Andrew Ponec, Justin Briggs, David Bierman, and the entire Antora team as they build the firm power infrastructure the AI era demands 🤝 🔗 On our blog, Claudine Emeott, Adrianna Alterman, and Dom Pusateri wrote more about our belief in Antora: https://lnkd.in/g6z55Zq8

📸 Last week, we hosted a group of European technology leaders and Salesforce Ventures portfolio founders for an evening of connection and conversation in Paris. The aim of the evening was to create a forum for the sharing of ideas and insights around how enterprises are putting AI to work — and what it actually takes to reap the benefits of AI innovation. Thank you to all who attended and engaged 🙏

📸 Yesterday our EMEA team swapped the office for Centre Court. It was a privilege to be able to take a select group of portfolio leaders and members of the SFV network to Wimbledon for a day of world-class tennis and world-class company 🤝 Thank you to everyone who joined us: James Dacombe, Alex Holt, Alon Arvatz, James He, Tom Richards, Henry Comfort, Tobias Haefele, Jeffrey Fasegha, Robin Van Aeken, James Lo, Jonathan Low, Juan Pablo Sandoval, Russ d'Sa, Philipp Hoefer, Rohit Chennamaneni, James Patrick-Evans, Guglielmo Faglioni, Ryan Wilson, and Pascar Sivam.

5️⃣ lessons on company-building from two-time founder and current Upwind Security CEO Amiram Shachar: 👉 Your best ideas come from problems you've personally lived through. 👉 In a world where anyone can build, staying close to customers is key. 👉 A platform only works if there's a reason for everything to connect. 👉 Sometimes the smartest time to raise money is when you don't need it. 👉 80% of your day as a founder will be bad — and that's a good thing. Amiram didn't set out to build a security company. He was a DevOps engineer who saw firsthand how security tools fail the people doing the work — and built Upwind to fix it. 🔗 Our own Nowi Kallen and Kartik Gupta sat down with Amiram to talk about conviction, customer feedback, and why the hardest days are the ones that matter most: https://lnkd.in/e-9nCvrb

Congrats to Jack Zhang and the entire Airwallex team 🚀