John Somorjai

Somorjai received a BA from Dartmouth CollegeDartmouth CollegeDartmouth College is a private institution of higher education in Hanover, New Hampshire, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded by Eleazar Wheelock, it received a royal charter on December 13, 1769. The 1819 Supreme Court ruling in Dartmouth College v. Woodward preserved its private status. Alongside undergraduate liberal arts education, Dartmouth includes the Geisel, Thayer, Tuck and Guarini schools. It enrolled 7,273 students in fall 2025 and held a $9 billion endowment at June 30, 2025. Sian Leah Beilock, in office since June 2023, remained president as of October 2026.Open the full entry and a JD from the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry. Before joining Salesforce, he was vice president of business development at Ingenio until the company was acquired by AT&TAT&TAT&T (AT&T Inc.) is a telecommunications company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Its predecessor was SBC Communications, a regional holding company created in the 1984 breakup of the Bell System; SBC merged with the original AT&T Corp. in 2005 and adopted its name, and it has since operated a nationwide wireless network and fiber broadband, at one time also owning DIRECTV and WarnerMedia.Open the full entry.⁠[1][2]

Somorjai joined Salesforce in 2005 and, as executive vice president of corporate development, led the evaluation, execution and integration of the company’s strategic transactions; his team completed more than 80 acquisitions, including ExactTarget, Demandware, MuleSoft, Tableau, SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry, Vlocity, Quip, SteelBrick, Datorama and Click.⁠[1][2]

In 2009 Somorjai helped found Salesforce Ventures, Salesforce’s corporate venture arm, and has been its president since it began investing. The unit has invested more than $5 billion in 400 companies from seed to IPO, including Auth0, BetterUpBetterUpBetterUp is a U.S. coaching and workforce development platform founded in 2013 that provides human and AI coaching to employees of client organizations; it was valued at $4.7 billion after its 2021 Series E.Open the full entry, Databricks, DocuSign, Guild Education, nCino, Snowflake, Snyk, Stripe and Zoom, with more than 150 exits including Dropbox, Twilio and Zoom; it describes itself as the world’s second most active corporate venture program.⁠[1][2]

From 2017 to 2021 he served on the board of directors of the National Venture Capital Association.⁠[1][2]

In 2023 Somorjai was promoted from executive vice president of corporate development to Salesforce’s chief corporate development and investments officer, overseeing the group’s M&A. In June of that year Salesforce Ventures doubled its generative AI fund to $500 million three months after launching it, investing in generative AI companies including RunwayRunwayRunway (Runway AI, Inc.) is a New York–based artificial intelligence company that grew out of the ITP program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2018. It develops video generation models and tools for the film, advertising and creative industries, has released the Gen-1 through Gen-4.5 series of models, and has extended its research to “general world models” that simulate the world in real time.Open the full entry, Typeface and Hugging Face as well as Cohere and Anthropic; acquisitions over the preceding year included the sales compensation platform Spiff and the low-code app development platform Airkit, both Salesforce Ventures portfolio companies. As of 2024 Salesforce Ventures also had regional funds for Europe, India, Australia and Canada and two Impact Funds, and a 39-person team that included staff absorbed from the Slack Fund.⁠[2]

Somorjai was named to Global Corporate Venturing’s Powerlist 2024 of the 100 leading corporate venturing professionals.⁠[2]

On November 6, 2026, a16zAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry published “Inside Salesforce’s Acquisition Strategy for the AI Era” on YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry, featuring Somorjai on Salesforce’s acquisition strategy in the AI era.⁠[3]

X: Public account: https://x.com/jsomorjai (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsomorjai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]