industry-cloud
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The Billion-Dollar Hour at Dreamforce
David Schmaier went to Dreamforce looking for the next great vertical-software company. He could not find it. So he built Vlocity - and six years later, Salesforce bought the answer for about $1.33 billion.
Infor
Infor is a multinational enterprise software company that builds industry-specific cloud applications - ERP, supply chain, human capital management, and financials - for more than 60,000 organizations across manufacturing, healthcare, distribution, hospitality, and the public sector. Headquartered in Atlanta and owned by Koch Industries since 2020, Infor differentiates itself with 'micro-vertical' CloudSuites purpose-built for narrow industry niches and delivered on Amazon Web Services.
Gordon Ritter
Gordon Ritter is Founder and General Partner of Emergence Capital, the San Francisco-based venture firm he co-founded in 2003 that became one of the defining forces in enterprise SaaS investing. He backed Salesforce in its earliest days, co-founded a SaaS company with Marc Benioff, championed Veeva Systems when it had 25 employees and under $1M in revenue (now a $35B public company), and helped land Zoom's first institutional check. A four-time Forbes Midas List honoree, Ritter closed Emergence's seventh fund at $1 billion in March 2025, focused on AI-native enterprise software. Away from the portfolio, he has summited Denali, run 250 miles across the Swiss Alps, and serves on Princeton's Board of Trustees, where he shapes AI and education curricula.