In the last article in our series of AI investors for 2024, we spoke with Citi venturesone of the more lively enterprise capitalists over the last decade, focusing on investments in artificial intelligence.
“We haven’t seen anything this groundbreaking in corporate investing in the last 20 years,” he said Matt Carbonaramanaging director of Citi Ventures, the investment arm of the banking giant Citigroup.
With AI, customer-side motivation is greater than with any recent technology, and many Fortune 2000 corporations are exploring use cases for it, he said.
Smart entrepreneurs naturally look for opportunities to innovate and disrupt, and investors look for high-performing corporations. He added that each one three elements are consistent.
“We had to try to move quickly, move quickly, be ahead of these companies and build relationships before we financed them,” Carbonara said of competition among investors in the artificial intelligence sector. “It was a very active area.”
The company invests in corporations that can help CitiGroup transform its business.
Artificial intelligence is a horizontal technology, he said. “Coding, compliance and regulation, data quality, employee productivity and knowledge management – these are the areas we were really thinking about,” Carbonara said.
Citi’s wealth management division could also profit from automation.
Carbonara said CitiGroup employs 40,000 programmers, representing almost a quarter of its employees. “Even a 10% increase in productivity in such a large group would be important for Citi,” he said.
The artificial intelligence corporations in which Citi Ventures has invested so far include: knowledge management company Collect; Writerwhich offers content generation for corporations organized by industry; compliance launch AI standard; developer productivity startup By the pool; AND Galileowhich is used to watch, debug and improve the accuracy of AI models.
This yr, two Citi portfolio corporations were also acquired. Lexionwhich uses artificial intelligence to handle contracts, was acquired by Document for $165 million in money and Datavolowhich takes data from PDF files and other documents and places it in a vector database, was acquired by Snowflake for an undisclosed sum.
Active corporations
According to Crunchbase data, Citi Ventures closes the list of the top 10 leading enterprise capital firms investing in corporations related to artificial intelligence. Her team consists of 18 people spread across the Bay Area, New York, London, Singapore and Israel. The company has roughly 120 lively portfolio corporations.
Other lively enterprise capital firms investing in artificial intelligence, based on Crunchbase data evaluation, include: Google Ventures, NEXT Samsung, Salesforce Ventures 1, Nventures (which is a part of Nvidia), Data brick ventures, M12 (Microsoftenterprise fund), Intel capital, Bloomberg Beta and OpenAI startup fund.
In addition, Microsoft Amazon AND Alphabet have invested billions directly in model corporations, including OpenAI AND Anthropic obtaining the largest amounts from these investors.
adoption of artificial intelligence
Carbonara says most of Citi Ventures’ portfolio corporations have integrated artificial intelligence to some extent. While some have added generative AI in a significant way, most of the interest is in the native AI category, he said, and app corporations are beginning to see real revenue.
Venture investor Sapphire ventures he recently published a post estimating this 47 or more corporations with native AI applications they have over $25 million in revenue.
Carbonara agreed that the implementation of applied AI is starting to realize momentum: “They are ready and they are just easier. Enterprises are still learning. It’s a new skill set. How to implement it? How to achieve the desired accuracy? It’s an iterative process, unlike someone coming to you with a baked cake.”
In Citi Carbonara’s portfolio, it tracks corporations that have achieved significant implementation.
“We see this with Glean. We see this with Writer. It’s the app development corporations that are some of the fastest growing corporations that make significant revenues when you say, “Hey, this is a real business that’s going to be a big business.” “