Company data plumbing
Data platforms, search and integration work that make a company's own data usable by AI.
Who is making money
The companies earning or raising real money in this part of AI. Suppliers are marked: they sell to the builders rather than to end users.
Sells Microsoft Fabric, a data platform that sits beside its Office and Azure products.
20M+ users (2025)
Open profileSells the CRM, and its Data Cloud and Agentforce products put company data and AI agents inside that CRM.
Agentforce ARR about $800M in the quarter to Jan 2026, up 169% year on year (company, Q4 FY26)
Open profiledata and AI platform
About $4B a year, growing 50%+. $100B+ valuation
Open profiledata cloud
Over $4B product revenue guided
Open profileData integration and data quality software for large firms, now owned by Salesforce.
Open profilesearch across a company's own data
$7.2B valuation. Over $100M a year
Open profiledatabase with AI search built in
$5B valuation (Oct 2025)
Open profileStreaming data platform built on Apache Kafka that moves live business events between systems.
Open profileSearch engine company whose database finds matching text and meaning for AI apps.
Open profileCopies data from business apps like CRMs and accounting tools into a warehouse, and now owns dbt Labs, which cleans that data into shape.
Open profileA database for flexible business records that now also stores the vectors AI search uses.
Open profileManaged vector database that stores the number codes AI apps use to search by meaning.
Open profileTurns PDFs, emails, slides and scans into clean text that AI models can read.
Open profileOpen source vector database for building search and retrieval into AI apps.
Open profileWhere the money flows
Companies pay usage fees to data platforms and project fees to integrators to clean and connect data before AI can work.
bought Informatica to add data integration and quality tools to its CRM
partnership to offer Claude models inside the Snowflake data cloud
partnership to offer OpenAI models inside the Databricks platform
The openings
Gaps still open in this area, from ones a small business could take to ones only giants can play.
- Small business Data clean-up and readiness projects for small and mid-size firms
- Small business Connectors that sync messy business systems into one database agents can query
- Startup money Company memory for agents with proper permissions
- Giants only A full data and AI platform
Standalone AI databases have been commoditised by ordinary databases, and models that read much more at once need less elaborate plumbing.
Sources: menlovc.com
The map updates three times a week.
241 companies across 25 areas, 62 money flows and 89 openings so far. New research lands every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
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