New fund will empower Japanese startups, fuel cloud innovation and drive customer success

Unveiling of fund kicks off Salesforce World Tour Tokyo

Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today announced that Salesforce Ventures, the company’s global corporate investment group, has launched the Japan Trailblazer Fund, a new $100 million fund to empower Japanese startups in the Salesforce ecosystem. With this new fund, Salesforce Ventures strengthens its position as one of the leading foreign corporate venture capital investors in Japan and deepens its commitment to creating the world’s largest ecosystem of enterprise cloud companies to fuel customer success.

IDC forecasts that Japan’s public cloud services market will more than double between 2018 and 2022, surpassing $13 billion in 2022¹. Salesforce recognizes this incredible opportunity, and with the Japan Trailblazer Fund will provide additional funding and support to Japanese startups delivering unique capabilities to Salesforce customers.

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Salesforce Ventures has supported the Japanese startup community since 2011, investing in 40 innovative companies, including:

• BizReach: Japan’s premier online career networking service, transforming the Japanese business community in allowing career-driven executives to freely share and directly connect with talent-seeking employers and recruiters.
• freee: An automated online accounting software that syncs with your bank accounts and automatically categorizes entries to create financial reports. freee is offered to SMBs operating under the Japanese taxation system.
• Sansan: The market leader in cloud-based business card management and sharing service for organizations in Japan.
• TeamSpirit: A leader in Japanese time tracking and web expense that offers a truly cloud-based attendance management system and just went public in August 2018.
• Terrasky: A leading public, Japanese Salesforce System Integrator (SI) offering consulting, implementation and support.

Comments on the News:

“With the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Japan is recognized as an excellent place to start and build globally competitive technology companies,” said Shinichi Koide, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce Japan. “The new Japan Trailblazer Fund from Salesforce Ventures will provide valuable support to technology entrepreneurs throughout their start-and-scale journey. I look forward to future successes as they make progress toward next generation cloud economy.”

“There is incredible innovation happening in Japan today, and the Japan Trailblazer Fund represents our continued commitment to Japanese startup growth and customer success,” said John Somorjai, EVP of Corporate Development and Salesforce Ventures at Salesforce. “With this new fund, we are excited to further support innovative Japanese entrepreneurs and empower the next generation of enterprise cloud companies that will benefit our customers.”

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“Salesforce Ventures is an incredibly strong partner to Japanese startups,” said Koji Ogishima, CEO of TeamSpirit Inc. “The investment and the unique access we get to the Salesforce ecosystem has enabled us to expand our business faster and maintain that rapid pace of growth.”

Driving Customer Success and Innovation with World Tour Tokyo

The unveiling of the Japan Trailblazer Fund fund kicks off Salesforce World Tour Tokyo, taking place today at Tokyo Big Sight. The Salesforce World Tour is a global roadshow where Trailblazers share how they are using the Customer Success Platform to create connected customer experiences, learn new skills, innovate at their companies and shape the future. World Tour Tokyo will feature a keynote from Salesforce Co-Founder & CTO Parker Harris, specialized breakout sessions for every role and industry and live demos of cutting-edge cloud-based technologies.