Salesforce reveals it spent $75 million on the three startups it bought last quarter
Christophe Morin/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Salesforce spent $32.8 million on MetaMind, the natural language processing and image recognition startup it bought in April. It spent an additional $41.6 million on two other companies it didn't name, but they are likely PredictionIO and Implisit Insights.
This is the first time Salesforce publicly disclosed the financial details of these deals. Salesforce's spokesperson wasn't immediately available for comment.
One interesting nugget from the MetaMind acquisition is that Salesforce recorded $31.2 million in goodwill, which represents the amount paid for the company beyond what's valued on the balance sheet. That means Salesforce paid a 95% premium to the book value of MetaMind's assets.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was one of the early investors of MetaMind.
Salesforce has been scooping up a number of startups in the machine learning and artificial intelligence space lately. Besides these three startups, it also bought MinHash and TempoAI last year, both aimed at making Salesforce more predictable and smarter. On top of that, it spent $390 million on predictive analytics software maker RelateIQ in 2014.
All this is part of Benioff's drive to turn Salesforce into a much smarter, data-driven software. During Salesforce's most recent earnings call, Benioff reiterated this vision, saying Salesforce's next growth-engine will come from artificial intelligence. He said:
When I look at kind of the next major trend for Salesforce and our industry that will drive tremendous growth is got to be artificial intelligence. And as we look out into the future and we start to look at extreme improvement and advances in artificial intelligence whether it's machine learning, whether it's deep learning, whether it's machine intelligence itself, I think that those kind of capabilities appearing inside our applications that is going to be a major growth capability going forward.
- Luxury homes soar to 21 per cent market share; Affordable housing declines to 20 per cent in 5 years
- India poised to become world's third largest consumer market by 2026 outpacing Germany, Japan
- IPL's impact player rule implemented as test case, can be revisited: Jay Shah
- Indian smartphone market up 8%, 5G smartphones account for over 70% of shipments
- Manchester United named world’s most valuable football club! MLS dominates top 50 list - the Messi effect?
- Nothing Phone (2a) blue edition launched
- JNK India IPO allotment date
- JioCinema New Plans
- Realme Narzo 70 Launched
- Apple Let Loose event
- Elon Musk Apology
- RIL cash flows
- Charlie Munger
- Feedbank IPO allotment
- Tata IPO allotment
- Most generous retirement plans
- Broadcom lays off
- Cibil Score vs Cibil Report
- Birla and Bajaj in top Richest
- Nestle Sept 2023 report
- India Equity Market