Salesforce is a US software company founded in 1999 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, and one of the leading providers of cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software. Across sales, service, marketing and commerce, the company offers a broad portfolio of enterprise applications on a subscription model. Salesforce was founded on March 8, 1999 by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez, and went public in June 2004.
Product portfolio
According to Wikipedia, the core offering includes Sales Cloud (sales management), Service Cloud (customer service), Marketing Cloud (marketing automation) and Commerce Cloud (e-commerce), built on the Force.com development platform. Salesforce expanded its ecosystem through acquisitions including MuleSoft (2018, integration software), Tableau (2019, data analytics and visualization) and Slack (2021, team communication).
AI relevance
Salesforce first integrated AI capabilities into its products under the Einstein brand. In September/October 2024, according to Wikipedia, the company introduced "Agentforce" — an agentic AI, succeeding Salesforce Einstein, that enables the use of chatbots within its software. At its Dreamforce 2025 conference, Salesforce bundled its AI-agent tools under "Agentforce 360" and renamed its customer data platform Data Cloud to Data 360; at the same time, Marketing Cloud was rebranded "Agentforce Marketing," adding AI agents for campaign planning, dynamic segmentation and cross-channel activation.
Business model
The business is based on recurring subscription revenue. AI features serve as an additional value contribution with which Salesforce aims to retain existing customers and unlock incremental revenue by automating routine tasks in sales and service.
Key figures
For fiscal year 2026 (ended 31 January 2026) Wikipedia reports revenue of roughly US$41.5 billion, operating income of about US$8.3 billion and net income of about US$7.5 billion, with about 83,334 employees. Market capitalization stood at roughly US$186 billion as of March 2026. The chief executive is Marc Benioff. The shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker CRM and have been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 2020.
Building an application ecosystem
Salesforce shaped the model of cloud-based enterprise software early on and expanded its offering through acquisitions and in-house development into a broad ecosystem — from sales and service through marketing and commerce to analytics and collaboration. The individual clouds draw on shared customer data, which makes Salesforce a central data hub for many companies.
Competitive position
Salesforce shaped the model of cloud-based enterprise software early on. According to Wikipedia, in August 2022 the company surpassed SAP in revenue and market capitalization to become the world's largest enterprise-applications software company. The strategic lever behind its AI push lies in access to extensive customer and process data, on which Agentforce and its other AI assistants build. The business is based on recurring subscriptions; competition in the enterprise-software market is intense, and the value of AI features has to translate into measurable efficiency gains for customers.
This profile is a neutral description and is not investment advice.