The Salesforce History, from a garage to the tallest skyscraper in San Francisco

Leer este artículo en español →

Salesforce was born in March 1999 in a San Francisco apartment with an idea that sounded strange at the time: selling business software as a service over the internet. 27 years later, in fiscal year 2026, it brought in $41.5 billion and sells AI agents that work inside Claude, Slack or Teams. Along the way there was a slogan in the negative, an event that brings tens of thousands of people to San Francisco every year and some of the most expensive deals in enterprise software. If you are still not sure what Salesforce is, start with Discover what Salesforce is, much more than a CRM.

Salesforce summed up its first 20 years in this video:

The history of Salesforce in 15 dates

1999-2004: from an apartment to "No Software"

1999: a former Oracle executive builds a CRM in the cloud

Today it is easy to see Marc Benioff as a visionary. In 1999 he was an Oracle vice president, the youngest in the company, who after 13 years left to do something almost nobody was doing: business applications used from the browser and paid for by subscription, with no servers, no installations and no upgrades.

Salesforce's first office, in Telegraph Hill (1999).

There was no garage, whatever the headline says. Salesforce started in a rented room near Benioff's home in Telegraph Hill, San Francisco. There were four of them: Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Frank Dominguez and Dave Moellenhoff, with posters of the Dalai Lama and Albert Einstein on the wall.

The first prototype was ready in a month. It was very basic, with tabs at the top and lots of links, like the websites of the time, but it already had accounts, contacts, opportunities, reports and sales forecasts. Benioff's reference was Amazon: a business application should be as easy to use as an online store.

The Salesforce CRM in 1999.

That first version brought the first customers. By July 1999 Benioff was working on the project full time, and by November the company had 10 employees and an office in the Rincon Center.

2000: the launch and the "No Software" campaign

With the new millennium Salesforce had a product and an office on One Market Street, but it was too small to get noticed through the usual channels. The launch took place at the Regency theater with a performance: the stage was a software company turned into hell, with salespeople shouting and caged employees escaping upwards until they found Salesforce.com.

"No Software", the slogan that stayed with Salesforce for years.

The event came with a campaign built around a slogan in the negative that became the brand's signature for years: "No Software".

2003: Dreamforce is born

Salesforce had been running City Tours, events of a few hours across the country to show new features and the road map. In 2003 it went for something much bigger: a multi-day event in San Francisco, Dreamforce, which is still the company's big annual event.

2004: Ohana

In Hawaiian culture, Ohana is family in the broad sense, by blood, adoption or choice, where each member is responsible for the others. Benioff put that idea at the heart of Salesforce's culture, and in 2004 the first Hawaiian-themed event brought customers, employees and partners together around the company's values.

2005-2011: from application to platform

2005: AppExchange

In 2005 Salesforce launched AppExchange. BusinessWeek called it "the eBay for business software" and Forbes compared it to iTunes. It is a marketplace where partners publish apps that any Salesforce customer can install, and it was the first step for Salesforce to become more than a single product.

AppExchange, in 2005.

2006: Apex and Visualforce

At Dreamforce 2006, with more than 5,000 attendees, Salesforce introduced Apex, a programming language to write and run code on its multi-tenant platform. Customers, partners and developers could now work with the same language on the same platform.

The Apex presentation at Dreamforce 2006.

Soon after came Visualforce, built by Parker Harris, to customize any screen: forms, buttons, links or custom components. Apex and Visualforce were the origin of what was presented at Dreamforce 2008 as Force.com.

2009: the first billion and Chatter

In February 2009 Salesforce announced that its fiscal year 2009 had closed with $1.077 billion in revenue. It was the first cloud computing company to pass that mark. The same year, at Dreamforce, it introduced Chatter, an enterprise social network inside the platform, with a mobile app and integration APIs.

2010: Heroku

To extend its platform, in 2010 Salesforce bought Heroku for $212 million in cash. Heroku offered a platform as a service for developers to run their own applications in the cloud.

2011: the world's most innovative company, according to Forbes

In 2011 Forbes published its first list of the world's most innovative companies, and Salesforce topped it. It stayed near the top of that list for years.

2012-2016: marketing, mobile, Lightning and Einstein

2012-2013: Marketing Cloud is born

With Sales Cloud and Service Cloud established, Salesforce started buying its way into marketing: Radian6 in 2011 for $326 million, Buddy Media in 2012 and, in June 2013, ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. Those three deals created Salesforce Marketing Cloud. If you want to know what it looks like today, read What is Marketing Cloud Engagement?

2013: Salesforce1 and mobile

Salesforce's first mobile app was very limited. In 2013 came Salesforce1, with all the data and almost all of Salesforce's features on the phone. The first years were hard, with slow loading and frequent errors. Today the app no longer has that name and is built on Lightning.

2014: Customer Success Platform and Analytics

At Dreamforce 2014 Salesforce presented itself as the Customer Success Platform: no longer just a CRM, but a platform for customer-centered digital transformation, up against ERP giants like SAP and Microsoft, which were more focused on financial processes. For analytics, Salesforce had bought EdgeSpring in 2013, which launched in 2014 as Wave and was later renamed Einstein Analytics.

2015: Lightning and Trailhead

After 16 years with almost the same look, at Dreamforce 2015 Salesforce launched Lightning, a new interface for any device. It shipped before it was finished: for a while it was impossible to migrate because many Classic features were missing and there were performance problems. It did not become a real option for most customers until late 2017.

The same year brought Trailhead, Salesforce's free learning platform, with a new look and characters the whole ecosystem knows today: Astro, Codey and friends.

2016: Einstein and thirteen acquisitions

At Dreamforce 2016 Salesforce introduced Einstein, its first AI layer, designed so that any customer could use AI features without coding.

It was also a year of acquisitions, thirteen in total. Among them:

• SteelBrick, today Salesforce CPQ, for the quote-to-cash process.
• Demandware, for $2.8 billion, which became Commerce Cloud.
• Quip, for $750 million, for collaborative documents and project management.
• Krux, a DMP that became part of Marketing Cloud.

The one that got away was LinkedIn: Microsoft made a better offer and won it.

2017-2021: the big acquisitions

2017: the Fourth Industrial Revolution

With IoT and AI, Salesforce added a new story to the Customer Success Platform: the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It was a way of saying it wanted a much bigger place in companies' technology.

2018: MuleSoft, Datorama and Salesforce Tower

In 2018 Salesforce bought MuleSoft, one of the leading integration providers, with customers like Coca-Cola, Barclays and Unilever, in a deal worth about $6.5 billion. MuleSoft gave it the connection to the back-office systems it needed to compete with the giants of enterprise software. That year it also bought Datorama, an Israeli marketing intelligence company, for about $800 million.

And it moved into Salesforce Tower, the tallest skyscraper in San Francisco, whose construction began in 2013.

2019: Tableau, Blockchain and Salesforce.org

In May 2019 Salesforce announced Salesforce Blockchain, a platform to share data securely with third parties, connected to its CRM.

The big news came in June: the acquisition of Tableau for more than $15 billion. In one move Salesforce brought together the largest data analytics platform and the leading CRM, and added Tableau's more than 86,000 customers.

Salesforce acquires Tableau (2019).

That year Salesforce also brought in Salesforce.org, its organization for the nonprofit and education sectors, for $300 million, and finally released myTrailhead, the version of Trailhead to train each company's employees.

2021: Slack

The pandemic moved work from offices to the cloud, and Salesforce answered with the most expensive acquisition in its history up to then: Slack, for $27.7 billion in cash and stock, closed in 2021. With Slack it competed head-on with Microsoft Teams and gained a place to connect employees, customers and partners with CRM data.

Salesforce and Slack.

2022-2023: data and generative AI

2022: from Salesforce CDP to Data Cloud

In 2022 Salesforce entered the CDP market with its own product, built on the platform. The first versions of Salesforce CDP were immature, but the approach was new: unify data with big data technology and activate audiences in marketing platforms. That same year it was renamed Genie and, at the end of 2022, Data Cloud.

It was not the only rename: Pardot became Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Interaction Studio became Marketing Cloud Personalization.

2023: Einstein 1 and Einstein Copilot

At Dreamforce 2023 Salesforce presented the Einstein 1 platform, which combined Data Cloud data with the platform's metadata model to build AI apps with little code, and Einstein Copilot, a generative AI conversational assistant. Benioff's message was trust: "The AI revolution is a trust revolution. Your data is not our product."

The Einstein 1 platform (2023).

2024-2026: the age of agents

2024: Agentforce

At Dreamforce 2024, in September, Salesforce introduced Agentforce, a suite of autonomous AI agents for sales, service, marketing and commerce. Benioff called it the third wave of AI: after predictive models and copilots came agents that can do the work, not just suggest it. Einstein Copilot became part of Agentforce, and Benioff set a public goal: one billion agents with Agentforce by the end of 2025.

2025: Informatica, Data 360 and Agentforce 360

On May 27, 2025 Salesforce announced the acquisition of Informatica for about $8 billion, a deal that closed in November. It brought in the enterprise data management that agents need to work with clean, reliable data.

In June came Marketing Cloud Next, the agentic version of Marketing Cloud built on the Salesforce platform. We explain it in What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next?

At Dreamforce in October 2025 Salesforce brought its offering together under Agentforce 360, and Data Cloud was renamed once again: since October 14, 2025 it has been called Data 360. We cover it in What is Salesforce Data 360?

2026: Salesforce goes beyond Salesforce

Salesforce closed fiscal year 2026, on January 31, with $41.5 billion in revenue, up 10% on the previous year. In June it announced two more deals: Contentful, a content platform, for about $1.5 billion, closed on September 1, and Fin, formerly Intercom, which builds AI agents for customer service, for about $3.6 billion.

The big announcement came at Dreamforce 2026, from September 15 to 17: AIforce. Salesforce data, workflows and permissions show up wherever each person works: in Claude, in Slack, in Microsoft Teams or inside Salesforce itself with Agentforce Coworker. We explain it in What is Salesforce AIforce? and, on how to govern agents, in What is the Salesforce Enterprise AI Harness?. We cover the Claude piece in What is Claudeforce?

Joaquín País, CEO of ShowerThinking, explains AIforce on video:

From "No Software" to a single source of truth

In 2000 Salesforce introduced itself with a slogan in the negative: "No Software". 26 years later the message is again almost the opposite of what you would expect: the CRM is no longer just a screen you have to log into. It is the source of truth that people and agents use from the tools they already work in.

What has not changed is how the company grows: subscription, platform, a very strong community around Dreamforce and Trailhead, and big acquisitions when it wants to get there before anyone else.

Salesforce history FAQ

Who founded Salesforce and when?

Marc Benioff, a former Oracle executive, together with Parker Harris, Frank Dominguez and Dave Moellenhoff, in March 1999 in San Francisco.

How much revenue does Salesforce make?

In fiscal year 2026, which ended on January 31, 2026, Salesforce brought in $41.5 billion, up 10% on the previous year.

What are Salesforce's biggest acquisitions?

Slack, for $27.7 billion (2021), Tableau, for more than $15 billion (2019), Informatica, for about $8 billion (2025), and MuleSoft, for about $6.5 billion (2018).

What is Agentforce?

It is Salesforce's platform of autonomous AI agents, introduced at Dreamforce 2024. The agents work with Salesforce data and permissions in sales, service, marketing and commerce.

Are Data Cloud and Data 360 the same thing?

Yes. Data 360 is the name Data Cloud has had since October 2025. Before that it was called Salesforce CDP and Genie.

Where are Salesforce's headquarters?

In Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, the tallest skyscraper in the city, where the company moved in 2018.

Sources

• Salesforce, fiscal 2026 results (February 25, 2026)
• Salesforce, fiscal 2009 results (February 25, 2009)
• Salesforce, The History of Salesforce
• Salesforce, Dreamforce 2024 recap
• Bloomberg, Informatica acquisition (May 27, 2025)
• Salesforce Developers, Data 360
• Salesforce, agreement to acquire Contentful
• Salesforce, Form 10-Q for the second quarter of fiscal 2027