Salesforce has figured out how to grow without hiring. The company is aggressively bringing in top AI talent not by expanding job openings, but by folding in small, specialized teams from startups like Moonhub. At the same time, it is using artificial intelligence to slow hiring across internal functions and reduce reliance on human workers altogether.
The contrast is sharp. Last week, Salesforce confirmed it had brought on the majority of Moonhub’s team, a Menlo Park-based startup that built AI systems for vetting, hiring, and onboarding talent. But the move wasn’t a formal acquisition. “Salesforce did not acquire Moonhub,” a spokesperson said. “The Moonhub business is winding down. We’re bringing over the majority of their small but talented team to join Salesforce.”
In parallel, Salesforce’s chief financial and operations officer Robin Washington told analysts that the company is hiring fewer people overall. “We have reduced some of our hiring needs,” she said on a recent call, crediting AI with boosting productivity and allowing Salesforce to reassign 500 customer support workers to new roles. The company estimates those changes saved $50 million. Washington also noted that the company now requires fewer software engineers. “We view these as assistants, but they are going to allow us to have to hire less and hopefully make our existing folks more productive.”
Salesforce is investing in AI agents to do more with fewer people.
Moonhub was founded in 2022 by Nancy Xu, a former Meta engineer. The company built what it called the world’s first “AI Recruiter”, a software agent trained to autonomously source, vet, and engage job candidates from across the web. Its tools were designed to automate hiring end-to-end, from outreach to onboarding, and boasted the ability to cut time-to-hire by 50%. Moonhub claimed that 80% of the candidates surfaced by its system were interviewed, something few sourcing tools can match.
But Moonhub wasn’t just about efficiency. It positioned itself as a platform for fairer, more inclusive hiring. According to The Economic Times, rather than relying on outdated keyword-based filters, the company’s AI scanned public data from GitHub, LinkedIn, and personal websites to build rich, multi-dimensional candidate profiles. It focused on meaningful signals such as promotion frequency, project types, and demonstrated skill growth. The system was designed to bypass biased filters based on race, gender, or disability. Moonhub also worked with clients to improve the way job descriptions were written and how talent was evaluated.
CEO Nancy Xu was an outspoken advocate of a “human-in-the-loop” philosophy. “AI should not replace people in recruitment but support them in making more informed, fair decisions,” she said. Despite launching with a bold premise, that hiring didn’t need humans in the loop, Xu was clear that AI agents should empower recruiters, not eliminate them.
Still, the startup’s endgame now plays out inside Salesforce. In a post announcing the transition, Xu wrote, “As a customer and investor, Salesforce has already played a role in Moonhub’s journey. From our earliest conversations, it [was] also clear that our companies share deep core values like customer trust, along with a resolute conviction in the role AI agents will play in unlocking an era of global innovation and opportunity. We are excited for the impact we will make together.”
The entire Moonhub team, based in Menlo Park, will now help build out Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI platform focused on deploying autonomous agents across core enterprise workflows. These aren’t just chatbots. Agentforce aims to create AI systems that can complete complex tasks, like resolving customer tickets, qualifying leads, or potentially, screening and hiring new employees.
Xu described joining Salesforce as a way to “accelerate our mission in this next chapter.” She added that Moonhub’s “talented team will play a key role in advancing Salesforce’s AI strategy.” Salesforce, which was an early investor in Moonhub, now gets access to that team—comprising ex-Stanford computer science PhDs, former Twitter Cortex and Meta machine learning leads, and highly cited NLP researchers.
Moonhub raised $14.4 million in total funding from a mix of prominent backers including Khosla Ventures, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Day One Ventures, AIX Ventures, TIME Ventures, and individual investors like Susan Wojcicki (former YouTube CEO) and Index Ventures general partner Mike Volpi. It counted fast-growing startups and Fortune 500 firms among its clients.
Now, instead of operating as an independent platform, Moonhub’s technology and ideas are being absorbed into Salesforce’s product roadmap just not under its own brand.
Salesforce has been aggressively acquiring AI startups in recent quarters. In May, it announced its acquisition of Converge.ai, an automation company focused on intelligent workflows. Just last week, it finalized its $8 billion acquisition of Informatica, a data integration and metadata management firm. Both deals feed into Agentforce. And last year, Salesforce acquired Zoomin for $450 million and Own for nearly $2 billion, further evidence that the company is betting big on automation and AI-driven efficiency.
As part of that bet, Salesforce is transforming not just its product stack but its workforce. CEO Marc Benioff has been open about the role AI will play in the company’s operating model. In a statement last fall, he said that Salesforce’s AI agents will allow clients to avoid hiring new employees or gig workers during peak periods. Internally, Salesforce is already operating with the same logic.
The company is increasing headcount only in areas directly tied to growth, namely sales. Chief Revenue Officer Miguel Milano said Salesforce currently employs about 13,000 salespeople and plans to grow that team by 22% this year. Salesforce’s global headcount currently stands at 76,453.
Moonhub’s story may appear to be a startup success. But the reality is the company is shutting down. Its customers will not be carried forward. What survives is the team and the engineering knowledge they bring to Salesforce’s broader AI push.
The distinction matters. It’s an acqui-hire—an increasingly common maneuver in the enterprise AI economy, where strategic value lies not in the business itself, but in the people behind it. Moonhub, a company built to automate hiring, is no longer hiring. But its engineers are now building the very systems that let Salesforce and its customers do more with fewer people.
It’s not an acquisition. It’s not a hire. It’s a reverse acqui-hire.
