Profile of Salesforce Ventures, the company's investment arm that helped it post a $2.17B gain from stakes in tech companies like nCino and Snowflake in 2020
- Salesforce racked up a $2.17 billion gain on investments in 2020, mostly from its stakes in Snowflake and nCino, which both went public. Tweets: @abhishekxsingh , @benioff , and @jasoncwarner Tweets: Abhishek Singh / @abhishekxsingh : .@salesforce - an investor par excellence. Wait what! 👏🏻😀🍾 https://twitter.com/... Marc Benioff / @benioff : Salesforce delivered a $2.17B gain on investments in 2020, mostly from stakes in Snowflake & nCino. Oktas $6.5B acquisition of Auth0, we tripled in 8 months. nCino built on our platform from the beginning, others like Zoom forged partnership before IPO. 👍 https://www.cnbc.com/... Jason Warner / @jasoncwarner : It would be almost criminal if you were a mega company with as much free floating cash as they have and didn't have a world class late stage investment arm Key phrases: world class https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This profile closes a loop opened by Bloomberg's earlier look at Salesforce Ventures backing at least 31 startups in 2016: five years on, the arm's thesis — take equity in startups built on or adjacent to Salesforce — paid out visibly when Snowflake and nCino went public and drove a $2.17B investment gain for fiscal 2020.
Benioff's own framing matters for how to read the number: he stresses nCino was built on the Salesforce platform from the beginning and that Zoom forged its partnership before IPO, so the gain isn't incidental stock-picking but the financial expression of an ecosystem strategy. The subsequent earnings reports showing buybacks doubled to $20B show what those paper gains ultimately fed into.
First-order effects
- Snowflake and nCino's IPOs converted Salesforce's private stakes into a $2.17B mark-to-market gain in 2020 — direct earnings contribution from positions taken years earlier through the ventures arm.
- The win validates the dual mandate Benioff describes: each stake doubles as commercial alignment (nCino built on the platform, Zoom partnered pre-IPO), so the gain accrues to a business development strategy, not just a treasury function.
Second-order effects
- Portfolio gains give Salesforce balance-sheet room that peers without a ventures arm lack — the same reporting cycle later shows the buyback expanding to $20B and then another $10B increase atop it, funded partly by investment income rather than operating cash alone.
- Rival enterprise software vendors face pressure to institutionalize their own strategic-investing arms, since Salesforce can effectively get paid twice — once on the stake, once on the platform revenue the portfolio company generates.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, corporate venture arms shift from optional side bets to structural components of software-company P&Ls, where IPO windows for ecosystem startups materially move reported results — making big-cap software earnings partly a function of private-market exposure.
- The flywheel — invest in companies built on your platform, capture their upside at IPO — entrenches ecosystem lock-in, raising the bar for startups deciding which incumbent platform to build on.
The trend: Enterprise software leaders are turning strategic venture arms into recurring earnings contributors, fusing ecosystem lock-in with balance-sheet gains harvested at their portfolio's IPOs.