Continue Reading The Open Networking Stack for the AI Era
Emily Zhao
Managing Director
Get in Touch
Emily is a Managing Director at Salesforce Ventures focused on AI infrastructure and robotics, in addition to spending time across developer tooling and cybersecurity. She joined Salesforce Ventures in the spring of 2022 and helped launch its $1B Generative AI fund and led several investments in the fund, including Anthropic, Hugging Face, Together AI, fal, Runway, Cohere, and others.
Before joining Salesforce Ventures, Emily was an investor at Avenir Growth Capital, a venture-growth fund based in New York, where she spent most of her time on vertical SaaS, health tech, and application software at large. Emily’s experience spans across stages as she started her investing career as an associate in the Private Equity group at Blackstone and invested in corporate buyout transactions. She was previously an analyst at JPMorgan’s Investment Banking group and holds a BA in Economics and Art History from Dartmouth.
Based in Boston, MA and San Francisco, CA
Insights from Emily Zhao
Continue Reading The Backend for the AI Era
Behind the Investment: Anthropic
“Having someone who is invested in you, who you can trust, and who can help you find mutual successes is great, and we got that from the beginning with Salesforce Ventures.”
Continue Reading Behind the Investment: Anthropic
Continue Reading AI Needs Interpretability
Continue Reading Bringing AI to Structured Data
Deepening Our Commitment To Vercel
AI cloud platform with integrated hosting, edge infrastructure, and AI-native developer tools.
Continue Reading Deepening Our Commitment To Vercel
Continue Reading Welcome, Dyna Robotics!
Continue Reading Anthropic’s $13B Series F
Continue Reading Strengthening Our Commitment to Cohere
Salesforce Ventures Guide to Investing in Robotics
The 7 criteria every investor should consider when evaluating robotics companies.
Continue Reading Salesforce Ventures Guide to Investing in Robotics
Continue Reading The Robotics Breakout Moment
Continue Reading Welcome, fal!
Congratulations, Protect AI!
On the intended acquisition of Protect AI by Palo Alto Networks.
Continue Reading Congratulations, Protect AI!
Continue Reading Welcome, Chainguard!
Shaping an Efficient Growth Strategy: GTM Strategies For 2025
5 GTM recommendations from leaders within the Salesforce Ventures portfolio.
Continue Reading Shaping an Efficient Growth Strategy: GTM Strategies For 2025
Continue Reading AI Infrastructure Explained
Continue Reading Welcome, Together AI!
Welcome, Hugging Face!
We are excited to announce that we are leading the Series D round in Hugging Face, who has built the largest and most important open source community in AI today
Continue Reading Welcome, Hugging Face!
Welcome, Protect AI!
Announcing our investment in Protect AI, a category creator defining the MLSecOps space with a platform that addresses the security challenges faced by AI and ML systems.
Continue Reading Welcome, Protect AI!
Welcome, Runway!
Announcing our investment in Runway, a pioneer in democratizing AI tools for a new generation of storytelling and content creation.
Continue Reading Welcome, Runway!
Welcome, Cohere!
Our investment in Cohere, which provides access to advanced Large Language Models and NLP tools through one easy-to-use API.
Continue Reading Welcome, Cohere!
Welcome, Anthropic!
Our investment in Anthropic, an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Continue Reading Welcome, Anthropic!