Salesforce Ventures is the investment arm of Salesforce.

Salesforce Ventures has announced a $250 million generative AI fund, with Toronto-based start-up Cohere among the first four companies to receive investment. Cohere, which provides access to large language models and natural language processing tools through one API, has previously raised $170m, including a $125m Series B round in 2021. It is understood to be seeking further investment in a current funding round. Cohere will partner with Salesforce to bring its technology to Salesforce’s enterprise customers. (betakit)

The other start-ups to receive funding are US firms Anthropic, Hearth.AI and You.com.

Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) also announced the launch of EinsteinGPT, which combines Salesforce’s existing AI models with generative AI technology from partners, including OpenAI. The company’s investment arm was launched in 2009 to fund and partner with companies with the aim of expanding its platform’s features. Through its impact fund, Salesforce aims to invest in companies addressing issues including education, climate action, diversity, equity and inclusion, and providing tech for nonprofits and foundations.

Salesforce’s latest investment into generative AI and Cohere comes as an increasing number of corporations integrate generative AI technology into their products. This has included OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform, which received a $10 billion investment from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) earlier this year.

Unlike ChatGPT, which is launched and open to the public, Cohere focuses on developers and businesses to help them generate and organize text on a larger scale, including for moderating content, classifying data, to extract information, and even to write copy.

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