Salesforce Ventures

AI Funding Risks: Hedge Fund Collapse and Nvidia Financing

A recent rout in AI and chip stocks exposed fragilities in the AI funding boom, illustrated by Situational Awareness — a leveraged San Francisco hedge fund led by Leopold Aschenbrenner — which sold its public stock portfolio to Citadel after margin calls created a liquidity crisis. The piece flags vendor financing risks as Nvidia has made large, hardware-linked investments and commitments (including a reported $5 billion commitment to Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and reported talks to guarantee up to $250 billion for OpenAI). Corporate venture capital and new financial actors (big managers and private credit) now dominate AI financing, while special purpose vehicles (SPVs) are outpacing direct secondary trades on some platforms, underscoring evolving—and potentially systemic—financing risks for the AI buildout.

Investor Presentation Released: Salesforce Ventures

AI parsed presentation narrative: Salesforce Ventures is a strategic VC firm leveraging an evergreen funding model to provide 'patient capital' and privileged access to the Salesforce ecosystem. Their central thesis is to partner with enterprise software founders across all stages to build industry-defining companies that stand the test of time rather than seeking quick quarterly returns. Strategic pillars: Founder-friendly investment process, Multistage company-building lifecycle support.

Supabase Raises $500M Series F at $10B Valuation

Supabase announced a $500 million Series F round at a $10 billion pre-money valuation (about $10.5 billion post-money), marking another rapid valuation increase for the open-source Postgres-based backend. The company says usage grew over 600% in the past year and now serves nearly 10 million developers, a figure that doubled in eight months; it attributes much of the recent growth to AI-assisted development (over 60% of new databases launched by AI tools). Supabase this week also launched Multigres, a tool to simplify running Postgres at scale (managing replicas, failovers, connections, backups). The round was led by GIC, with participation from existing investor Stripe and new investors Georgian and Salesforce Ventures. CEO and co-founder Paul Copplestone announced the raise in a company blog post.