Salesforce starts first startup program in India
Global customer relationships management (CRM) solutions provider Salesforce has launched its maiden startup program in India. The program will offer startups, the California-based company’s AppExchange partner program, which is its online marketplace for cloud solutions. It will also offer support from the company's Trailblazer Community, a startups ecosystem under Salesforce.
The company also said that select startups will get an opportunity for investments through its venture capital arm Salesforce ventures. “We have been working with startups in various ways. What we're trying to do here is to provide a unified approach for Salesforce to connect to startups and vice-versa," said Sanket Atal, senior vice president and managing director for Sites at Salesforce.
According to Atal, the goal is to embrace all startups instead of having a "small cohort" of 5-10 companies for a few months. "A majority of startups don’t survive beyond 3-4 years, our program is designed to help the longevity of startups," he said.
The program offers services like business communications platform Slack, data visualization solution Tableau, cloud platform Heroku and others to startups.
“With the Salesforce Startup Program, we wish to innovate locally to resolve local problems while at the same time promoting these solutions globally," said Arundhati Bhattacharya, chief executive officer (CEO) and Chairperson, Salesforce India.
Companies like Cisco, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and many others have been working for this startup as accelerators and incubators.