Salesforce Ventures, the investment arm of the enterprise tech giant, on Monday said it’s committing another $500 million to investing in generative AI ventures, bringing its total earmarked funding for AI startups to $1 billion in the last year and a half, Salesforce exclusively told Forbes.

The money is going to the firm’s Generative AI fund, which first debuted in March 2023, months after the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT touched off a global AI phenomenon in late 2022. At the time, Salesforce committed $250 million to the fund, before upping it to $500 million three months later. Now Salesforce is doubling the amount once again.

“We went through the $250 million really, really fast,” John Somorjai, president of Salesforce Ventures, told Forbes. “In 18 months, we've gone through the full $500 million.”

Through the fund, Salesforce has quietly amassed a portfolio of some of the industry’s heaviest hitters, including Anthropic, Cohere, Mistral and Hugging Face, mostly through later stage investments, post-Series A. In all, the last $500 million was spent on two dozen AI companies, Somorjai said. (Other deals haven’t gone so well. Last June, Salesforce also added Humane AI to its portfolio, the embattled startup that later released a hardware device called the Ai Pin that was widely panned.)

The announcement comes as AI investments have reached eye-popping figures: OpenAI is reportedly in talks to raise about $6.5 billion at a valuation of around $150 billion. Groq, a chip startup focusing on inference speeds, last month raised $640 million, while its revenue last year was as low as $3.4 million. Poolside, which creates AI to write software, is reportedly raising $500 million at a valuation of $3 billion — before even releasing a product.

Salesforce Ventures has already begun deploying the new $500 million, but declined to disclose what companies. The tech giant made the funding announcement ahead of Dreamforce, the company’s biggest event of the year and San Francisco's largest annual conference.

Salesforce Ventures, founded in 2009, was designed to invest in startups that would build integrations with Salesforce products. Early bets included Docusign and Box, now both public companies, worth $11.5 billion and $4.8 billion, respectively. Since then, it has invested more than $5 billion, including bets in AI companies from before the launch of its dedicated Generative AI fund, like data intelligence platform Databricks (valued at $43 billion).

“This is going to give us an opportunity to really support the entrepreneurs,” said Somorjai. “And really help bring these great AI innovations to the market at a scale that will allow them to deliver it globally to all of our customers.”

Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff is very involved in the dealmaking process, approving every investment above a certain dollar amount, Somorjai said, though he declined to disclose how big a deal has to be before Benioff gets involved. Somorjai said Benioff has also met with many of the founders of portfolio companies, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Cohere CEO Aiden Gomez. The top-down approach is similar to that of Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, who leads the committee that signs off on all of the investments of its VC arm Nventures, the company told Forbes earlier this year.

Even though Salesforce Ventures spent its last half-billion investment dollars quickly, Somorjai isn’t committing to the same rate of dealmaking this time around. “When you have a hot company, everybody wants a piece of it,” he said. “We believe that we provide a lot of differentiated value to the companies that we've invested in,” including making intros to leaders of companies in Salesforce’s massive customer pool.

“And so hopefully that will help us get larger allocations in some of these rounds,” Somorjai said.