Emergence Capital

Emergence Capital is a San Mateo, California-based venture capital firm founded in 2002 by Gordon Ritter, widely regarded as the defining specialist firm of the enterprise Software-as-a-Service investing category, having been one of the earliest institutional believers in the cloud-delivered software model when the prevailing wisdom was that enterprise customers would never trust mission-critical software running on someone else's servers. The firm invests at seed, Series A, and Series B stages with initial checks from $10 million to $25 million in cloud software and SaaS businesses. Emergence was the first institutional investor in Salesforce, backing Marc Benioff's cloud CRM vision when Salesforce had virtually no revenue; Salesforce went on to become one of the most valuable enterprise software companies in the world. Zoom Video Communications completed a Nasdaq IPO in 2019 with Emergence as a major early investor. Box completed a NYSE IPO in 2015 and Veeva Systems completed a NYSE IPO in 2013, both with Emergence as a significant early investor. Beyond its original investments in Salesforce, Zoom, and Box, the portfolio includes Veeva Systems, SuccessFactors (acquired by SAP), and additional enterprise SaaS companies.