Salesforce acquires Vlocity
February 27, 2020
By Angharad Rhiannon
Customer relationship management solution specialist Salesforce has ended months of speculation by snapping up partner Vlocity for $1.33 billion (€1.21bn).
San Francisco-based Vlocity is built natively on the Salesforce platform and provides industry-specific cloud and mobile software to six key verticals – communications, media & entertainment, energy & utilities, insurance, health and government. Its solutions complement Salesforce’s own offerings in industry clouds such as financial services, health, manufacturing and consumer.
The firm, which had become one of Salesforce’s fastest-growing ISVs (Independent Software Vendors), has some 150 customers, including major players such as Telus and Sky Italia, and was on track to make $70-80 million this year. Its founders’ backgrounds – a mixture of Siebel and the Salesforce-native ISV Veeva – meant they were well-versed in the importance of having a strong vertical strategy. As CEO David Schmaier put it: “The best customer experiences are industry-specific”.
In the media & entertainment sector, Vlocity provides solutions that span the entire subscriber and advertising sales lifecycles for both B2C and B2B customer engagement. These include GoMedia OTT Streaming, which is a greenfield subscriber management solution that supports companies entering the OTT/Media/Video streaming markets, transforming complex billing and payment operating models into simpler, digital prepaid services. GoMedia Commerce allows Media & Entertainment firms to add high volume, anonymous, end-user e-commerce transactions that includes advance promotions, bundling and pricing capabilities for B2C, D2C and B2B use cases.
Vlocity had raised about $173 million across four rounds of funding plus seed capital from investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Accenture, New York Life Investment Management, Sutter Hill Ventures, TDF Ventures, Wildcat Venture Partners, Kennet Partners and Salesforce itself. Its last round of funding (2019) valued it at over $1 billion, which meant the final price paid by Salesforce was no real surprise to the market, although it represented a good return on investment for its shareholders.