It was last week reported chip giant Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures 1 AND Cisco all participated in a $450 million investment in the Toronto-based AI startup Cohere. On the same day, Cisco and its investment arm – Cisco investments announced the news, launching a $1 billion AI investment fund.
These noteworthy machinations of some of the biggest names in tech are just the latest examples of those corporate giants’ desire to be at best leaders in the generative AI sector and at worst not left behind.
So far this 12 months, of the handful of tech titans investing big in space, Microsoft and Nvidia – along with its respective enterprise arms – are among the leaders when it involves investing in VC-backed and AI-related startups, in line with Crunchbase data. However, others, e.g Google AND Data cubes they are not far behind and could also be gaining.
Let’s take a look at Big Tech and where they’re putting their money.
Nvidia
Of course, no company has been more successful in the AI revolution than Nvidia (perhaps too successful if the government has anything to say about it – but we’ll get to that). The company saw its market capitalization explode to just about $3 billion as its earnings exceeded forecasts.
According to Crunchbase, the company spent some of the incoming funds by investing in 10 rounds involving VC-backed AI firms data. These transactions include seven rounds valued at over $100 million, including:
- To participate in AI scales$1 billion mega round led by Speed up which valued the data labeling and evaluation startup at a staggering $13.8 billion. The recent financing also covered investments from Meta AND Amazon
- Attending Sunnyvale, California Character‘S supposedly a massive $675 million round at a pre-deal valuation of around $2 billion. The company is developing artificial intelligence-enabled robots that it hopes will have the opportunity to perform hazardous jobs and ease labor shortages.
- Based in Paris Mistral AI$640 million round – a combination of debt and equity – at a value of $6 billion, – in line with a report by the Financial Times..
The company’s enterprise arm, Nventures, also joined the party concluding the agreement. This 12 months, it was involved in 4 transactions, the largest of which was the acquisition of an artificial intelligence agricultural robotics company for $85 million Carbon robotics.
Last 12 months, Nvidia finalized 22 AI-only funding deals and one other 10 through NVentures.
Microsoft
Of course, early last 12 months, Microsoft fired the loudest shot in the AI arms race — agreeing to a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment in OpenAIthe startup behind artificial intelligence tools ChatGPT and DALL-E for a reported $10 billion.
Since then, Microsoft has continued to speculate significantly in artificial intelligence.
The largest was a massive $1.5 billion strategic investment in a UAE-based artificial intelligence company G42 take a minority stake in the startup.
However, this was not the only deal that the Windows developer concluded this 12 months. The company has made a quartet of deals, in line with Crunchbase data — although it is all the time a very lively enterprise arm, M12he did seven.
Three of the 4 deals she was involved in were large – at least $675 million – including a $1.05 billion deal for a London-based autonomous automotive startup Wayveand also the mentioned round figure.
Not to say Microsoft’s March deal with the company AI overkill pay the startup $650 million to license its AI software and hire most of its employees. The deal – seemingly structured to sidestep any regulatory hurdles since it is not officially an acquisition – once again demonstrated the tech titan’s insatiable appetite for all things AI-related.
The largest deal M12 has participated in meanwhile was an $80 million round for Palo Alto, California Foundrywhich is developing a public cloud specifically built for machine learning workloads.
Last 12 months, Microsoft and M12 made a total of 21 investments in artificial intelligence startups.
It’s not far behind these AI giants Google and its enterprise arm, G.Vwhich concluded a total of seven transactions involving VC-backed start-ups.
However, unlike Microsoft and Nvidia, Google’s transactions have been modest so far this 12 months. No round he has invested in has exceeded $57 million. In fact, Google itself has only invested in seed rounds for AI startups.
GV arguably made the most interesting deal, co-leading a $27.5 million Series A round WitnessAIa startup specializing in handrails that can make artificial intelligence safer and useful.
There’s more
Several other Big Tech firms, in addition to their investment arms, equivalent to Qualcomm AND Sales force have participated in several financing deals for AI-related startups this 12 months, but not at the same pace as the above group.
However, the still private company has made a lot of noise in the investment space by making no secret of its artificial intelligence intentions. Data cubes just last month announced recent Databricks AI fund inside Data brick ventures.
The enterprise department was already involved in eight transactions this 12 months – some quite large – before the fund was announced.
Databricks Ventures participated in a $200 million Series D round of AI-powered work assistants and enterprise search startups Collect which valued the startup at $2.2 billion. He also participated in the launch of AI search AI embarrassment$73.6 million Series B led by IVP — which also included firms like Nvidia and Jeff Bezos.
Possible warning
While there has been no sign of slowing enterprise investment in the AI space, news broke last week that each Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice would launch research into Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia, which could help refresh the ethos of investing in artificial intelligence.
While there is no evidence thus far that the Department of Justice will investigate Nvidia’s investment transactions, it has occurred reported The FTC will investigate Microsoft’s ties to OpenAI, in addition to Microsoft’s actions in the Inflection AI situation.
The dual probes could cause each firms to halt investments in startups – even if they are not the subject of the investigations – until it is clear how, if at all, the regulators’ actions might affect their businesses.
It may prompt other large corporations to reconsider some transactions so as to not be the next to face increased scrutiny.
If that happens, enterprise funding could see one other lull. In May, AI firms raised 40% of enterprise capital funding in the month, investing $12.5 billion in over 250 firms, based on Crunch Base data.
With AI now driving VC investment, the very last thing many people in the enterprise – that is, AI – need to see is Big Tech leaving.