M+E Connections

With little fanfare, Salesforce has acquired yet another company, this time Gravitytank, a self-described “innovation consultancy” firm with offices in Chicago and San Francisco.

The purchase was confirmed Sept. 15 by Salesforce spokeswoman Katherine McLaughlin. She declined to say how much Salesforce paid for Gravitytank or provide other details of the transaction, referring MESA to a blog post by Gravitytank partner Shailesh Patel.

The transaction hasn’t been finalized, according to Patel’s post, which didn’t provide an estimated time frame for the closing. Patel said: “Over the past 16 years, we’ve strived to combine design, research and strategy to bring clarity to the challenges of innovation. And we look forward to continuing that work at Salesforce, where we’ll be able to pursue our passion for helping customers around the world identify new business opportunities, reinvigorate their brands and disrupt their industries, on a much larger scale as part of the world’s No. 1 CRM platform.”

After the purchase is finalized, Gravitytank will “apply our expertise in design, research and strategy to help Salesforce’s customers shape their customer company vision and connect with their customers, employees and partners in new ways,” he said.

Earlier this month, Boston mobile messaging company HeyWire similarly disclosed in a blog post that Salesforce had purchased it for an undisclosed price. Salesforce didn’t make an announcement about that transaction either. Other recent Salesforce acquisitions included the much more high-profile $2.8 billion purchase of digital commerce company Demandware.

As CEO Marc Benioff pointed out during Salesforce’s recent second-quarter earnings call, its purchase of several artificial intelligence (AI) companies over the past few years, including RelateIQ, MetaMind, Implisit, PredictionIO and Tempo AI, enabled it to create Salesforce Einstein, an AI platform for customer relationship management that Salesforce will introduce at its Dreamforce conference, Oct. 4-7 in San Francisco.

Salesforce CFO Mark Hawkins made no mention of the Gravitytank purchase while speaking at the Deutsche Bank Technology Conference in Las Vegas Sept. 14. He instead mostly covered some of the same topics taken up during the Aug. 31 earnings call. But, speaking about mergers and acquisitions in general, he said: “It’s been part of our past and it’ll be part of our future.” Over the past 17 years, the “preponderance of our innovation has been done organically, but it’s been complemented” by mergers and acquisitions, he said.

Einstein is “going to take all of our clouds and take it to another level of helping our customer,” Hawkins said. Einstein will be embedded in the cloud and “our intention is monetization,” he also said, but provided no specific details.

“One of the things that we’ve done is knit together an amazing AI team and an amazing set of AI assets that literally will help make our CRM the smartest CRM in the world,” said Hawkins. He added: “It’ll help us and help all of our customers do things and address those logical next [things] that they need to do to be successful with their customers. So, imagine it having an impact across all of our clouds.”

About 170,000 people are expected to attend this year’s Dreamforce, which has sold out for the first time, he also said.