IBM launches $500 million enterprise artificial intelligence venture fund to support startups

IBM recently launched a new enterprise investment vehicle, the Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Venture Fund. The fund aims to back startups working to develop enterprise-focused AI products. IBM's move follows other tech giants also ramping up investments in the AI ​​startup ecosystem. A few weeks ago, Anthropic PBC, a large language model developer, received a total of up to $6 billion in financing from Amazon and Google. Most recently, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and SAP SE joined a more than $500 million investment in German artificial intelligence provider Aleph Alpha GmbH.

#IBM intends to support a number of startups “from early stage to hyper-growth” through its Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Venture Fund. According to media reports, IBM will pay special attention to startups that build products optimized for specific industries or use cases. IBM will avoid backing emerging artificial intelligence vendors that compete directly with existing portfolio companies, the report said.

Startups backed by the Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Venture Fund will receive marketing support in addition to funding. Support in this area will be provided in the form of partnership opportunities with IBM. In addition, portfolio companies will receive resources for "operational expertise in product and engineering and go-to-market strategies."

IBM made a number of investments in artificial intelligence startups before launching the fund. In September this year, IBM participated in a $50 million round raised by HiddenLayer. The platform developed by HiddenLayer focuses on protecting language models from cyber attacks. IBM earlier participated in a $235 million investment in Huggingface. Huggingface is an open source artificial intelligence model hosting platform operator similar to GitHub.

Rob Thomas, senior vice president and chief commercial officer of IBM Software, said, “Artificial intelligence will unlock nearly $16 trillion in productivity by 2030. We are creating another path with the launch of the IBM Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Venture Fund channel to harness the tremendous potential of the AI ​​revolution to deliver tangible, positive results for IBM and the companies we invest in.”

The Enterprise Artificial Intelligence Venture Fund is IBM’s effort to expand its presence in the rapidly growing artificial intelligence market part of a broader effort. The initiative also includes IBM's product development strategy.

IBM debuted a suite of artificial intelligence products called Watsonx earlier this year. This product includes tools that companies can use to develop artificial intelligence models and manage model data. In addition to this, WatsonX also provides pre-packaged neural networks that can optimize tasks such as software code generation

A few months after launching the product suite, IBM collaborated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to release An open source artificial intelligence model for analyzing satellite data. The model is designed to help researchers more easily identify areas that may be at risk of flooding and wildfires. IBM plans to add support for other use cases in the future.

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