Another week and one other round of crazy money injections and valuations from the world of artificial intelligence.
Deep LAI-powered language translation startup raised $300 million at $2 billion valuation; AI scales, a data labeling platform for machine learning models, secured $1 billion as its valuation nearly doubled to $13.8 billion; AND Ha fledgling French startup working on its own pioneering models has raised a staggering $220 million seed round at an undisclosed valuation (though it definitely puts H into unicorn territory).
While all the usual institutional investors like Accel, Index, and Y Combinator (YC) are present, these investments really highlight the corporate push to get in on the motion while keeping regulators at bay.
Quasi-fusion
Take for example Scale AI, a company that has so far attracted pure institutional investors and business angels from its inception in 2016 until its Series E round in 2021. Similar investors returned to Series F, but Meta also joined them , Amazon, Nvidia and the VC arms of Intel, AMD, Cisco and ServiceNow.
On the same day that Scale AI announced its powerful Series F investors, H showed its hand: Amazon also bought the company, along with Samsung’s VC arm and UiPath, an automation software company price $10 billion today.
Corporate investment in artificial intelligence startups has been a big story over the past few years, best exemplified by Microsoft’s close ties with ChatGPT developer OpenAI. This agreement was met with scrutiny from antitrust regulators in the European Union and Great Britainsparked by growing concerns that Big Tech is adopting a latest “quasi-fusion” a tactic of in search of control and influence over emerging technologies without purchasing them outright – this will likely include, for example, hiring startup founding teams or making strategic investments.
Microsoft is said to own a 49% stake in OpenAI, which means there could also be a query that should be answered once initial investigations by European regulators are accomplished – whether Microsoft has voting power in OpenAI or not.
Anthropic may find itself in a similar situation. The three-year-old company has raised over $7 billion from quite a few investors, with contributions from corporations corresponding to Google, SAP, and Salesforce and Zoom. But Amazon in particular is responsible for greater than half of Anthropic’s fundraising to this point, completing a $4 billion investment in March. Although the investment didn’t give Amazon a majority stake (as did Microsoft in the case of OpenAI), the British antitrust watchdog CMA confirmed last month that it was considering the deal to find out whether it qualifies for an antitrust investigation.
At the same time, the CMA also revealed that it was considering Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Inflection AI (a 12 months after Microsoft became Inflection’s largest backer), which resulted in Microsoft poaching founders and key collaborators to run a latest consumer AI division, leaving core A.I. Inflection intelligence focused on the enterprise segment.
The CMA also confirmed it was investigating Microsoft’s recent $16 million investment in French artificial intelligence startup Mistral. However, the regulator quickly concluded that the transaction didn’t qualify for review because of its relative size.
“The CMA considered the information provided by Microsoft and Mistral AI together with the feedback received in response to the call for comment,” a CMA spokesman said at the time. “On the evidence, the CMA does not consider that Microsoft obtained material influence over Mistral AI as a result of the partnership and is therefore ineligible to open an investigation.”
While Nvidia hasn’t historically been pushed into the same “Big Tech” bracket as the above-mentioned companies, it has change into one of the major players in the AI gold rush, and its clout can’t be overstated: the company was valued at this time last 12 months amounted to a considerable USD 770 billion, but in recent months this number has increased to over USD 2.5 trillion. This makes Nvidia the third most precious company in the world, behind Microsoft ($3.17 trillion) and Apple ($2.87 trillion), but ahead of Meta ($1.18 trillion), Amazon ($1.88 trillion) and Alphabet ($2.15 trillion).
Nvidia has invested in AI startup Hugging Face, alongside Amazon, Google, Qualcomm, Intel and others. Elsewhere, Nvidia bought shares in Cohere, Perplexity AI, Inflection AI, CohesionMistral AI, Weka, Wayve and many other AI startups.
Big Tech shows no signs of softening its ethos of investing in AI startups in the hope that purchasing smaller equity stakes may give them a regulatory pass. That doesn’t suggest, nevertheless, that the behemoths of Silicon Valley and Seattle won’t have the opportunity to exert some type of control over these companies – after all, they are stakeholders and can influence startups in a variety of how, subtle and not-so-subtle. ways.