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As part of the investment, Salesforce Ventures, the company’s investment arm, in May announced the launch of the US$100-million Canada Trailblazer Fund “to invest in Canadian startups and fuel cloud innovation and customer success in the region.” It also awarded US$100,000 to Waterloo, Ont.-based B2B sales and marketing startup FunnelCake at its first-ever Dreampitch Toronto competition (the startups had to be Salesforce customers to qualify for funding).

The fund is just another development in a relationship that has doubled Salesforce’s Canadian workforce over the past two years to 1,400,and boosted its Canadian customer pool past 6,000.

Though critics might moan about yet another tech giant sucking up local employees, startups and customers, Salesforce’s Canadian partners don’t seem to mind, and co-chief executive Keith Block said the relationship between the company and Canada goes far deeper than money.

Photo by Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press

“I don’t think we would want to be characterized as kind of the classic tech company that’s coming to take over,” he said at Dreamforce, the company’s immense and at times evangelical megaconference in San Francisco in late September. “We’re a values-based company. I think Canada is very much a values-based country. It’s a very open country. Equality is very, very important in Canada. Those are the sorts of things that resonate with us.”

Of course, Salesforce and its dominant market position will exist whether they set up in Canada or not, said Andrew Graham, co-founder and chief executive of Borrowell Inc., a Toronto-based fintech company. And while he believes there’s a lot to like about the big tech players focusing on Canada, he would rather the government focus on helping the country’s next generation of companies grow.