Salesforce continues its startup buying spree in a push to make more 'intelligent' software

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Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

(Salesforce CEO Marc BenioffSalesforce)

Salesforce just bought another data analytics startup called BeyondCore, adding to its buying spree this year.

The announcement was made through BeyondCore's blog post and confirmed by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's tweet.

The company declined to share financial details of the deal. BeyondCore has raised $9 million in total funding, according to Crunchbase.

BeyondCore is part of a recent Salesforce spending spree: The company has spent nearly $4 billion in acquisitions this year alone. The majority of that comes from the $2.8 billion deal to buy Demandware, but Salesforce has been snatching up startups at a record pace this year.

It's already bought 7 companies in 2016 so far, a huge increase given it acquired a total of 10 companies over the previous 3 years. A lot of the acquisitions have also been in the machine learning and data analytics space, as Benioff has repeatedly said the company will shift its focus to making its software smarter and more predictive going forward.

In a recent interview with Forbes, Benioff underscored this shift to creating more "intelligent" software, pointing out that systems capable of analyzing data and recommending the right course of action will be where the next wave of opportunity comes from.

"This will be the huge shift going forward, which is that everybody wants systems that are smarter, everybody wants systems that are more predictive, everybody wants everything scored, everybody wants to understand what’s the next best offer, next best opportunity, how to make things a little bit more efficient," Benioff said.

BeyondCore's team will join the Salesforce Analytics Cloud team, which launched in 2014, the company said in the blog post. Here's the tweet by Benioff welcoming BeyondCore:

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