Veeva Brand Guidelines: Life-Sciences Cloud From Pleasanton, Vault & the Salesforce Split

A life-sciences CRM built on another company’s cloud.

Veeva Systems was founded in 2007 by Peter Gassner and Matt Wallach, according to English Wikipedia, which cites the company’s annual report filed in March 2026. The company is based in Pleasanton, California, and sells cloud software, data and consulting services to the life sciences industry; English Wikipedia says its products are used to track drug development and pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Its first business was customer-relationship management for drug-company sales teams. The Motley Fool reported in December 2022 that Gassner had worked at Salesforce from 2003 to 2005, helping to build the cloud CRM software at the core of that company, and that when he started Veeva as a CRM product for the life sciences he partnered with Salesforce to handle the back-end data infrastructure. In exchange, the same report says, Veeva CRM became Salesforce’s referral partner for the life sciences industry.

The second pillar came in 2011, when Veeva introduced Veeva Vault, a content-management system for the life sciences industry, according to English Wikipedia, citing the company’s announcement of February 2011. Vault is now the name of Veeva’s own software platform, and the company’s website groups its applications under clinical, regulatory, safety, quality, medical and commercial headings, with versions for medtech, consumer goods, food and beverage and chemical companies.

Veeva became a public company in October 2013 through a listing on the New York Stock Exchange, English Wikipedia says, citing Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. In February 2021 it became a public benefit corporation; English Wikipedia calls it the first publicly traded company to make that conversion, and the company now publishes an annual report on its public-benefit commitments. Its website lists its core values as “do the right thing, customer success, employee success, and speed.”

Vault, CRM and the move off Salesforce.

The biggest change in Veeva’s recent history was announced in late 2022. The Motley Fool reported on 8 December 2022 that Veeva had said its contract with Salesforce would expire in September 2025 and that it did not plan to renew it. Instead, Veeva said it would move the back end of Veeva CRM onto its own platform, Vault, with a five-year wind-down period running to 2030 in which existing customers could keep using the Salesforce-based version. The report added that Veeva’s chief executive hoped the two companies would keep collaborating, given their many joint customers.

English Wikipedia records that Veeva ended its partnership with Salesforce in 2025, and describes Salesforce as a competitor. On Veeva’s website the CRM now sits within its commercial software, next to products for master data management, events, content and analytics. In August 2025 the company named Veeva Network for master data management, Veeva Nitro for analytics and Veeva AI among the products customers could use with outside data.

Veeva has also grown by acquisition. English Wikipedia lists the content-management company Zinc Ahead in 2015, the patient-data and analytics firm Crossix and Physicians World in 2019, and, in March 2026, Ostro, a maker of an AI chat tool for pharmaceutical brand engagement, citing Fierce Pharma.

On the clinical side, Veeva sells software for running trials, including electronic data capture under the Veeva EDC name, an electronic trial master file, a clinical-trial management system and study start-up tools, according to its website. That work brought it into direct competition with clinical-trial software specialists such as Medidata.

Screens, summits and the science.

Life-sciences software is sold to scientists, clinicians, regulators and procurement teams at once, and the way these companies present themselves reflects that mixed audience. Their websites and brochures tend to show clean dashboards on laptops and tablets, molecule renderings and data charts, and people in lab coats or at clinic desks looking at screens. The product, in other words, is usually shown as an interface rather than an object.

The colour schemes follow the same logic. Many of these brands set one or two bright product colours against a lot of white space, so that charts, buttons and status labels stand out, and they use plain sans-serif type that stays legible in dense tables. Product families are often split into named “clouds,” “suites” or “platforms,” each with its own sub-brand, so a single company can carry dozens of product names under one mark.

Much of the selling happens in person. The sector gathers at trade conferences such as the DIA Global Annual Meeting, which brings together people working on drug development and regulation; Bio-IT World, which focuses on data and computing in life-sciences research; and SLAS, the laboratory-automation and screening society’s conference. Larger vendors also run their own customer summits, with keynote stages, product launches and user sessions; Medidata, for example, says its NEXT conference grew out of a user group for its Rave software.

Ownership matters too: several of the companies in this round have changed hands, and some have been bought by larger groups while keeping their own names. The guides in this round set out who founded each company, who owns it now and what it makes, and they mark clearly which statements rest only on the company’s own word.

Two long legal disputes, both now closed.

Two rivals took Veeva to court in 2017. The first was IQVIA. According to Bates White, the economic consultancy that acted as Veeva’s expert in the case, IQVIA alleged that Veeva had used unauthorised access to proprietary IQVIA data to improve its own products, and Veeva countersued, alleging that IQVIA had abused monopoly power to restrict how customers could use its data with their own software. On 18 August 2025 the two companies announced long-term clinical and commercial partnerships and “the complete resolution of all pending legal disputes” in a joint press release. Bates White says that under the settlement neither party pays damages and both dismissed all claims and counterclaims with prejudice. The companies agreed data and software access terms that let customers use IQVIA or Veeva data with each other’s software, and IQVIA joined Veeva’s programme for contract research organisations running trials on Veeva software.

The second was Medidata, the clinical-trial software company, which sued Veeva and five former Medidata employees in federal court in New York in 2017, alleging that confidential information had been used for Veeva’s benefit. In July 2022, partway through a jury trial, the judge granted Veeva’s request to end the case before it reached the jury, Reuters reported; Clinical Trials Arena reported on 18 July 2022 that the court had concluded Medidata failed to substantiate its allegations.

For a design guide, Veeva shows how a software brand that began on another company’s cloud can carry one name across clinical, quality and commercial products once it moves onto its own platform. Compare Salesforce, the platform Veeva’s CRM was first built on, and Medidata, a rival in clinical-trial software. For this guide we use a warm orange, ink and slate grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Veeva’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.