Salesforce: the cloud software company and what it does

Salesforce, Inc. is a San Francisco software company that sells customer relationship management, or CRM, applications over the internet, along with data, analytics, integration and AI tools. Its annual report describes it as the number one provider of CRM software worldwide.

The company is now betting heavily on AI agents. It reported $41.5 billion in revenue for fiscal 2026, and Agentforce, its platform for building software agents, reached $800 million in annual recurring revenue.

Overview and Founding

Salesforce was incorporated on March 8, 1999, by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Frank Dominguez and Dave Moellenhoff. Benioff had spent 13 years at Oracle, the database company co-founded by Larry Ellison, before starting the business.

The founders built the first version of their sales software in a rented one-bedroom flat on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. The service launched on February 7, 2000, at an event built around the slogan “The End of Software”, which set out the plan to deliver software over the internet instead of installing it on company servers.

From the start the company committed 1 percent of its equity, product and employee time to community work, an approach it calls the 1-1-1 model. It lists five core values: trust, customer success, innovation, equality and sustainability.

Key Milestones

• 1999: Salesforce is incorporated on March 8 in San Francisco.
• 2000: The first product launches on February 7.
• 2003: The company holds its first Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
• 2004: Salesforce lists on the New York Stock Exchange on June 23, raising about $110 million at $11 a share.
• 2005: AppExchange, a marketplace for apps built on its platform, opens in September.
• 2016: Salesforce launches Einstein, its AI technology for CRM.
• 2021: The company completes its acquisition of Slack in July, after buying MuleSoft in 2018 and Tableau in 2019.
• 2024: Salesforce introduces Agentforce.
• 2025: It announces a $500 million investment in Saudi Arabia in February and completes the purchase of Informatica later in the fiscal year.

What It Does

Salesforce sells cloud software that companies use to manage sales, customer service, marketing and online commerce. Customers pay mainly through subscriptions, and subscription and support revenue made up $10.7 billion of the $11.2 billion earned in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026.

For the full fiscal year, subscription and support revenue was $39.4 billion, against $2.1 billion from professional services and other work. The company also generated $15.0 billion in operating cash flow.

Its product family has grown through acquisitions. Slack provides workplace messaging, Tableau handles data visualisation, MuleSoft connects business systems through APIs, and Informatica, bought for a total net consideration of $9.6 billion, adds data management.

Agentforce sits on top of these products. It lets customers build AI agents that use live business data, follow company rules set inside Salesforce and take actions in its applications, and the company says it had closed more than 29,000 Agentforce deals since launch by the end of fiscal 2026.

The platform also connects with tools from other providers. Salesforce is listed among the reported connectors in our report on how Google Cloud launches Gemini agent.

Salesforce has a confirmed presence in the Kingdom. On February 10, 2025, at the LEAP conference in Riyadh, it announced a $500 million investment in Saudi Arabia, including local hosting of its Hyperforce platform through Amazon Web Services and plans for regional headquarters in Riyadh. LEAP has since drawn other enterprise technology firms, as our report on Deloitte Middle East at LEAP 2026 shows.

In Numbers

• Revenue: $41.5 billion, up 10 percent (fiscal 2026)
• Remaining performance obligation: $72.4 billion, up 14 percent (fiscal 2026)
• Free cash flow: $14.4 billion, up 16 percent (fiscal 2026)
• Agentforce annual recurring revenue: $800 million, up 169 percent (fiscal 2026)
• Subscription and support revenue: $39.4 billion (fiscal 2026)
• Employees: 83,334 (January 31, 2026)

Leadership

Marc Benioff is chair, chief executive officer and co-founder. Robin Washington is president and chief operating and financial officer, Miguel Milano is president and chief operating officer, and co-founder Parker Harris is adviser to the CEO.