Salesforce Assists In $43M Round For Partner OSF Digital

OSF CEO Gerry Szatvanyi tells CRN he is on the hunt for acquisitions and ways to grow his technological capabilities and presence in different geographies and verticals.

OSF Digital, a Canadian digital transformation and global commerce products and services provider, has closed on a $43 million round of funding, with participation by the investment arm of strategic partner Salesforce. This brings OSF’s current total raised to date to $66 million.

The funding will help OSF, based in Quebec and formerly known as OSF Global, acquire new businesses. CEO Gerry Szatvanyi (pictured above) told CRN in an interview he hopes to close four acquisitions this month and then up to four acquisitions by the start of 2022. He also hopes to grow his employee count of about 1,200 to 1,500.

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Szatvanyi is on the hunt for companies and ways to grow his technological capabilities and presence in different geographies and verticals, he said. The Americas and Asia Pacific are regions OSF hopes to grow in the short term. Expansion, however, doesn’t include new vendor partners — OSF is all in with Salesforce.

“We believe there is a very good reason why we should go much deeper into the relationship with Salesforce instead of going around and spreading ourselves thin chasing other vendors,” he said. “There is a lot of demand around digital transformation, centered around Salesforce.”

Existing investor Delta-v Capital led the round, while Salesforce Ventures participated — the second time Salesforce has participated in an OSF financing round. OSF Digital board chairman David Northington, board director Jeff Rich and board advisor Gary DiOrio made personal investments.

OSF Digital has a Navigator Expert ranking from Salesforce for its B2C Commerce, B2B Commerce, Consumer Goods and Retail categories. OSF has been a Salesforce partner for more than 10 years. It received the 2020 Partner Award for Most Relevant Commerce Cloud Project, the 2019 Bolty Award for Best Digital Experience in Retail and Consumer Goods, and the 2019 Partner Innovation Award for Customer 360.

OSF’s customers include L’Oréal USA, Ubisoft and Stonewall Kitchen. Part of the fuel for OSF’s growth is customers launching new direct-to-consumer and business-to-business channels through Salesforce tools and services.

Customers have shown interest in buying tools and services within Salesforce various cloud offerings, including Marketing, Sales and Service clouds.

“We are winning over customers that are coming from other platforms, and also customers that just start their journey,” he said. “There are many companies that haven‘t gone direct to consumer yet, and they are really investing now in direct to consumer platforms.”

Szatvanyi sees OSF dominating the space just below the global systems integrators (GSIs) like Accenture and Deloitte. “With our plan, we can get there in the next two to three years,” he said. OSF is currently profitable.

One of the challenges for OSF growing is finding enough job candidates. Salesforce itself has acknowledged the employee pipeline problem and invested in programs such as the Talent Alliance to try to train more workers in its ecosystem.

Recent investments from Salesforce Ventures include big data startup Starburst Data, cybersecurity vendor Auth0 and big data analytics software developer Databricks.

Delta-v has participated in investment rounds for cloud services provider 2nd Watch and security services provider Arctic Wolf.