A list of 85 funds investing in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning I. Investing in AI Investing in AI is not an easy job: AI technologies are black boxes and unless you are able to dig into lines of code they may be inscrutable. Simply looking at proof of concepts might not be enough to really understand the underlying stack behind specific applications, and this represents a big barrier for investors to efficiently allocate their capitals. found then alternative ways to discern investable companies from the pile of tech-driven companies out there. Instead of looking at the code or the algorithms, they identified proxies for AI technologies, a sort of to help them cutting out media phenomena from interesting ventures: Generalist investors must-have list i) : if a problem was not addressable before, it is really likely that a machine learning algorithm is behind the proposed solution of that problem; Impossible problems ii) : it is common knowledge that neural nets require a lot of data to be trained, and if the startup has a way to create a virtuous data cycle ( ) or has access to proprietary data, this is sometimes enough to be deemed as investable; Data effect ‘ data network effect ’ iii) the biggest barrier to entry AI/ML is and . Therefore, if a team is composed of scientists/researchers and (obtained or pending), it would already be a good candidate for an investment even without any revenues. This is driven by top tech companies acquiring smaller startups simply for their ‘brain power’ rather than their actual numbers. Team and Patents: talents IP has patents Image Credit: . Aniwhite/Shutterstock II. So, who are the smart guys with the wallet? AI specialists are luckily not that naive, but they are able to go much deeper and look behind the veil. As I already , AI investors have different characteristics from more general investors: pointed out in previous articles i) : they usually should have a deep(er) capital base (it is not clear yet what AI approach will pay off); Deep Capital Base ii) : investing in AI is a marathon, and it might take ten years or more to see a real return (if any). The investment so provided should allow companies to survive many potential “AI winters” (business cycles), and pursue a higher degree of R&D even to the detriment of shorter term profits. An additional key element of this equation is the , which is still missing and needs to be monitored to act promptly accordingly. Of course, in saying that, I only refer to the right hand of my , because for narrow AI companies the risk tolerance may indeed be lower; Higher Risk tolerance regulatory environment AI Classification Matrix iii) : venture capitalists use the help of ‘venture partners’ or ‘scientists in residence’, but AI specialized investors are able to dig into codes and architecture by themselves. First-Hand Coding/Engineering Experience Marc Andreessen, Bill Maris and John Doerr (left to right). Image Credit: . http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2013/04/10/john-doerr-marc-andreessen-and-bill.html III. List of AI Investors I then compiled a list as extensive as possible of every investor I read or bumped into over the past months. It looks like there are of them: at least 85 a seed investment fund focusing only on machine intelligence companies with 5 investments under the belt; 26 Ventures (NY): they have a wider investment thesis, but they also recently embedded (€80M) into their fund to invest in robotics startups; 360 Capital Partners (Milan/Paris): Robolution Capital as many funds on the list, they don’t need any presentation. They have 15+ AI/ML companies in their portfolio; 500 Startups (Bay area): less than one year ag and probably was the largest deal made in 2016; Accel Partners (Bay area): o they had closed several deals in AI, Paxata you won’t find anything about AI in their investment strategy or any hint of machine learning in their speech or news. In spite of that though, their portfolio enumerates a list of fantastic AI-driven companies: ; ; ; ; ; ; . also was one of the few investors at a seed stage in ; Amadeus Capital (London): Graphcore AlgoDynamix Five AI Kreditech Prowler.io Ravelin Speechmatics Amadeus Capital Improbable their motto says — quite self-explanatory I guess. One of the main active investors in this space; AME Cloud Ventures (Bay area): ‘inventing the future with Data’ a Chinese-American investor that operates according to the following theme: ; Amino Capital (Bay area): Big Data + Machine Learning + Domain Agnostic investors in companies like and , they have a partner who wrote down a fantastic report on machine intelligence ( , ); Amplify Partners (Bay area): Scaled Inference Enlitic David Beyer see the report here nothing to say on a16z because their work speaks for itself. They have though an interesting program called ‘ , through which they host CS experts in their fund for a year or so. (the creator of ) was the last professor joining a16z, after , probably one of the best biomed scientist of the last decade. They are investors in several machine learning companies, but in particular in Final point: one of their investors is , who writes a brilliant blog/newsletter , and they have a podcast page with very interesting insights on AI (check ’s ); Andreessen Horowitz (Bay area): Professor-in-residence’ Fei-Fei Li ImageNet Vijay Pande what I believe to be the best AI company out there: Anki . Benedict Evans you should subscribe to Frank Chen presentation here early-stage European investor with few investments done but a strong focus on AI. He is managed by Westerheide and they are also the main organizers of the conference ; Asgard Capital (Berlin): Fabian “Rise of AI” 6-months old $200M fund investing , part of the larger ; Baidu Venture (China): in AI, VR, and AR $3B Baidu’s investment strategy small early stage fund ($30M) with a great portfolio, though: , , and, of course, . Bee Partners (Bay area): StatMuse Skycatch Iris Automation, TubeMogul leads the effort of investing the $150M under management raised over the last few years in two funds. Everyone knows about their beautiful and informative which is updated every year by ; Bloomberg Beta (Bay area): Roy Bahat ‘Machine Intelligence Landscape’ Shivon Zilis founded by and , it is a venture fund that does Seed and Early Stage Venture Investments with a hint of startup studio approach. They backed up companies like , , and among others and they organize a brilliant event called “ ” in Silicon Valley; BootstrapLabs (Bay area): Ben Levy Nicolai Wadstrom Mendel Health Sibly.co AEye Roger.ai Applied AI Conference investors in companies like and , they raised with IDG Breyer Capital (Bay area): Kensho Circle a billion fund to invest in AI in China; the BritBots fund is being managed by in partnership with , and it will invest check of £300k+ in 12 startups. The fund is closing in two months, so curious to see what companies they will initially invest in; British Robotics Seed Fund (Suffolk, UK): Sapphire Capital High Growth Robotics investors with a mixed business model lying at the intersection between a VC, an incubator, and a research lab ( ); Comet Labs (Bay area): Comet Labs Research Team : they don’t simply invest in analytics-driven startups, but ; Correlation Ventures (San Diego) their investment strategy and process are data-drive as well many VCs of this list put money into Crunch Fund back in 2011, and they did with $60M over 200 investments (with only one check exceeding $1M), including [x.ai](http://Internet, Virtual Assistant, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Scheduling Website: https://x.ai), , , and ; Crunch Fund (Bay area): uBiome Datos IO Marble series-A investors, currently investing their 16th fund. They just invested in the first weeks of 2017 into , , and ; CRV (Bay Area): Rethink Robotics Sense Lola Travel investors in AI and VR/AR technologies, it has recently raised $250M for their second fund; Danhua Capital (Bay area/China): is really likely out there. It looks that two managing partners and backed 14 of the recent list made by CBinsights. I am not entering into the details of their portfolio because I am impressed every time I see it. I only say one of the most recent acquisitions in AI industry: (acquired by Intel); Data Collective (Bay area): Data Collective the best data investor Zachary Bogue Matthew Ocko ‘AI 100 companies’ Nervana Systems and DKV invest in AI, biotech and fintech companies, and they are well-known in the space because they are employing an AI (or at least a sort of intelligence machine) as a director in their investment board. This machine is called (Validating Investment Tool for Advancing Life Sciences); Deep Knowledge Ventures (Hong Kong): Dmitry Kaminskiy VITAL straight after having acquired Analytics Media Group (AMG), they announced the new fund investing in data, analytics, and technology; Dolan Family Ventures (NY): investors in companies like and , they prevalently seem to focus on hardware (which it may take the form of robots, IoT devices, semiconductors, etc.); Eclipse Ventures (Bay area): Kindred Kinema Systems even if is in business since less than one year now, they were able to help and fund a discrete number on interesting companies such as , , . The fund, which will mainly focus on European companies, raised €566M to be invested in tech startups. Andreas Thorstensson, former Toborrow CTO and now partner at EQT, has also developed ‘ ’, an AI software that sources investment leads; EQT Ventures (Stockholm): EQT Ventures Verto Analytics Odeon Technologies Watty Motherbrain seed investors in , , and later investors in , as well as and , they started in 2006 with an angel fund ($4.5M) to end up in 2014 with a $200M proper fund; Felicis Ventures (Bay area): Scaled Inference Vicarious Diffbot Cambrian Genomics Fitbit : led by , they invest in Seed and/or Series A rounds with checks of $500k — $750k. They also created, in partnership with NYU Tandon School of Engineering, a new AI-accelerator called They are investors in , and among others; FF Venture Capital (NY) john frankel AI Nexus Lab . Dashbot Skycatch Wade & Wendy great data/AI investors, they bet on , , , and personal assistant . All those investments were led by , who shares his . I highly recommend it, it is an incredibly well-written, useful and inspiring blog; FirstMark Capital (NY): Cockroach Labs Dataiku HyperScience Amy (X.ai) Matt Turck thoughts on his blog to my knowledge, they will not raise any additional fund anymore, but simply keep going doing follow-on investments for a while; Formation 8 (Bay area): formerly known as Rothenberg Ventures, they mainly focus on seed stage investments. In the last year, it has been investigated (and still are I think) by the SEC and other agencies. In their portfolio there are companies like , and ; Frontier Tech Ventures (Bay area): Tissue Analytics Wade and Wendy Gridspace half incubator half VC, Frost is a sort of hybrid structure that created companies such as or ; Frost Data Capital (LA area): Maana Sentrian : they are investors in machine learning and blockchain technologies. , who is leading the effort of the newest second fund ($30M), is one of the and has invested in , , and among others; Future Perfect Ventures (NY) jalak jobanputra top influential leaders in the Fintech space Everledger Civic Fusemachines VC arm of GE, in terms of AI investments. They invested into , , and , in addition to many others; GE Ventures (Bay area/Boston/Houston): it is second only to GV or Intel Capital Ayasdi Sight Machine Human Longevity a very good Canadian group of investors (Justin LaFayette, , , and others), one of the few funds investing in analytics and AI in Canada. Recently investors in and , released an interesting some time ago and a useful from their Chief Analytics Officer (who is part of the Impact team along with , Madalin Mihailescu, and others); Georgian Partners (Canada): Steve Leightell Jane Podbelskaya WorkFusion Integrate.ai Georgian Partners white paper on principles of applied analytics presentation on AI Chris Matys Jon Prial tech-driven investors in cleantech, healthcare, and semiconductors/IoT, they have invested in in 2015; Giza Venture Capital (Tel Aviv): Logz.io still in the process of properly raising the fund (target at $150M), it is managed by former partners at Fairhaven Capital; Glasswing Ventures (Boston): this is the second fund raised by Shenzhen-based Chinese technology firm Group to invest in AI, IoT, smart cities and robotics. Although Chinese, the fund is located in Israel, but it will invest worldwide; Global Community of Innovation Fund (Tel Aviv): Kuang-Chi : officially renamed in 2016, it is the venture capital arm of Alphabet which grows of $300M per year. The team ( , , , , etc. ) is led by and they invested in fantastic companies as, for example, , , , , , and . , one of GV’s general partners, also writes at : definitely a must-read blog. Google Ventures (Bay area) GV Tom Hulme Blake Byers Laura Thompson Joe Kraus David Krane Savioke Momentum Machines Orbital Insight Kindred MightyAI MindMeld M.G. Siegler 500ish Words has recently raised a billion fund to invest in tech companies, both at consumer and enterprise level, on any stage, anywhere. Investors in Facebook, Dropbox, Linkedin and many others (they also invested in itself), they have an interesting portfolio of AI and analytics companies: , , , and the robo-advisor , only to name a few. On a final note, (Greylock partner and Linkedin co-founder) has backed a new ; Greylock Partners (Bay area): Greylock Partners Medium Ozlo Trifacta SumoLogic Wealthfront Reid Hoffman $27M fund to promote research into AI in the public interest founded by , it is a $100M fund focused on smart hardware, robotics and IoT. Grishin Robotics (NY): Dmitry Grishin German investors with investments in companies like , and , they will host the conference this year in Berlin together with Asgard VC; High-Tech Grunderfonds (Bonn): Cunesoft Mecuris Evalu “Rise of AI” to not be confused with , they are the investors behind , , , , Siri and ; Horizons Ventures (Hong Kong): Horizon Ventures Cortica TempoAI Sentient Technologies DeepMind Viv seed stage investment firm which recently invested in and ; Hyperplane (Boston): Tellus Labs Sentenai founded by , it has invested in , , , and among others; IA Ventures (NY): Roger Ehrenberg x.ai Tellus Labs Lygos DataRobot Sight Machine seed stage investor that helps entrepreneurs also through a series of different programs. Plenty of investments in robotics (e.g., ), AI software (e.g., ) and life science applications (e.g., ); Innovation Works (Pittsburgh): BossaNova Conversant Labs Qualaris these are their official numbers: in 25 years, $11.8 billion invested in over 1,478 companies in 57 countries; 214 portfolio companies have gone public and more than 403 were acquired or participated in a merger. Impressive; Intel Capital (Bay area): another big Canadian investor, with a hybrid structure to invest in cutting-edge companies (e.g., ) but also in other funds as well (e.g., Georgian Partners — see above for details) Kensington Capital Partners (Canada): D-Wave Systems , , , , , , , , , and many others; Khosla Ventures (Bay area): they don’t need any introduction. They backed several AI and analytics companies over the past few years, as for instance Ayasdi Scaled Inference Vicarious Kaggle Atomwise Lumiata Zebra Medical Vision Bay Labs Ginger.io Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group (LCIG) represents the $500M Lenovo’s venture arm; is an example of recent company they invested into; Lenovo Capital (Beijing): Face++ : managed by John Spindler and , they have a ‘ ’ (to invest in early stage AI companies coming out from their member universities and accelerators) and they launched the ‘ ’ to co-invest with four other funds monthly in AI-driven startups; London Co-Investment Fund (London) Capital Enterprise Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme Turing Initiative super recent fund launched this year with one investment under the belt ( ). Let’s wait and see. Loup Ventures (Minneapolis): Neurable is made by a terrific group of science-driven investors ( , , , and many others) and they invested in great startups such as , , , , and (part of Intel now), only to name a few. They also have a to help them in the investment process ( — check out his new book ‘ ’); Lux Capital (Bay area/NY): Lux Capital Josh Wolfe Shahin Farshchi Bilal Zuberi Cape Analytics Zoox Clarifai Orbital Insights Nervana Systems ‘ scientist-in-residence’ Samuel Arbesman Overcomplicated is a 20+ years investor, which spotted out companies like Amazon but also , (now part of Apple), , , and . One of their Venture Partners is , who runs the nonprofit At AI2, as it is known, they focused a lot on and over the past few years, as well as they were able to spin-off two successful projects ( and more recently ); Madrona Venture Group (Seattle): Madrona Venture Group Algorithmia Turi Mighty AI Context Relevant Integris Oren Etzioni Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence . NLP semantic analysis KITT.ai XNOR.ai : they raised last year a $240M fund with the goal of investing in AI, ML and Big Data technologies. They have already invested in and co-founded two accelerators in the Bay ( and the ). In addition, one of the founding partners has been hosting an since a few years now to introduce startups to investors; March Capital Partners (LA area) Dojo Madness The Fabric Hive annual summit : has more than £160M under management, 6.5% of which personally invested by MMC team members. In the past two years, the multi-funds have been recognized . They recently co-led a Series A round in , , as well as . The Head of Research has written a and sharpened the fund investment thesis around AI with a ; MMC Ventures (London) MMC Ventures as one of the most active funds in the UK Signal Media GrowthIntel Sky-Futures David Kelnar wonderful primer on AI deep analysis of the AI landscape in the UK they have one of the largest portfolios out there, and great AI/machine learning investments include , , , (formerly Dato), , and many other; NEA (Bay area): The Climate Corporation Kensho tamr Turi Wit.ai DataRobot very large investors with presence in India and Israel, they invested in companies like , , and ; Norwest Venture Partners (Bay area): AnalyticsMD CognitiveScale Exabeam is one of the few European investors in AI, and they bet on , , and others. , part of the Notion team, is also one of the organizers of , a great meetup in the City; Notion Capital (London): Notion Capital DueDil FiveAI DemystData Alexandre Flamant LondonAI : they recently raised a £120M fund to invest specifically in AI in the UK after the three great exits they had over the past few years ( , , ). They will invest early stage anything from £250,000 to £25m in the first round of funding; Octopus Ventures (London) Evi Technologies Swiftkey Magic Pony Technology founded by after selling Braintree to Ebay, it is a VC that invests ‘ ’. I love the spirit they invest with, and they invested in incredible companies ( , , , , , , etc.); OS Fund (NY): Bryan Johnson with the purpose to improve the lives of billions of people around the world for generations to come Emulate Human Longevity 3Scan Viv Vicarious Atomwise a different type of VC which places initial bets on several companies, and then raises additional money from their network (the crowdfunding part). They invested in and among others; OurCrowd (Israel): Zebra Medical Vision VocalZoom a fund managed by , who by the way wrote a which I highly recommend. They invested in , a sort of recommendation engine, which seems to be advised by Sebastian Thrun (the founder of Udacity); Permutation Ventures (Bay area): Riva-Melissa Tez really interesting piece on AI hype Crossing Minds : founded by Manish Singhal and , they just announced their first close ($13M) a few months ago for half of the target fund ($30M). They plan to invest in 18–20 early-stage startups in the following 3–4 years and they just completed their fourth investment; Ventures pi (Bangalore) Umakant Soni to my knowledge, was not a proper AI-oriented VC fund until came in ( , is really well-written and informative). Great investors, they rapidly became a cornerstone of AI London ecosystem (and they also organize an annual and a ). Investors in , , , , , and others; Playfair Capital (London): Playfair Capital Nathan Benaich subscribe to his newsletter AI Summit meetup Numerai DueDil Mapillary Ravelin Seldon investors, incubator, and innovation platform, is the symbol of the “startup ecosystem”. They invested or help to start a bunch of companies such as , , , , and others; Plug and Play Ventures (Bay area): Plug and Play Tech Center Api.ai Sensay fido.ai Predikt is managing the fund, which invested in , , and ; Procyon Ventures (Boston): Drew Volpe Infinite Analytics Weft Smarking led by , this fund has a quite incredible AI portfolio: , , , , , , as well as other AI stealth startups. They also were investors in 4 of the top 100 on CBI’s latest top 100 AI Company list. Their investment strategy is also pretty clear (check it ); Promus Ventures (Chicago): Mike Collett Kensho CrowdFlower Gigster June Cape Analytics Gauss Surgical here a $100M (CDN) fund which invests in companies. The founder Mike Lazaridis is, for the ones who do not know that, the former founder of BlackBerry. The reason why this fund is within the AI list is because of the recent wave of results in quantum computing thanks to machine learning, as well as the potential impact it of quantum computing on AI (a few articles , , and ). His last investment has been ; Quantum Valley Investments (Waterloo, Canada): ‘Quantum Information Science’ here here here Cognitive Systems although does not claim to specifically invest exclusively in AI technologies, a quick look at its portfolio clearly positions it as one of the most prolific investors in the space in the Canadian ecosystem. They backed companies like ; ; and, more recently, , the new company lead by and ; Real Ventures (Montreal): Real Ventures iSentium plotly Imagia Element AI Yoshua Bengio Jean-Francois Gagné 20+ years in the industry, $1.5B under management, and almost 400 investments in their portfolio. They were also investors in Palantir, as well as , , and . RRE Ventures (NY): Digital Genius Yhat Jibo the venture arm of Salesforce was involved in the $8M round of , which was its biggest AI deal of the year, as well as , , and ; Salesforce Ventures (Bay area): Amplero 6sense Msg.ai Qubit in addition to pre-existing funds, Samsung has just launched NEXT, a new $150M fund in emerging technologies. They have already invested in (formerly Expect Labs) as well as and ; Samsung Ventures (Tel Aviv): MindMeld Dashbot BioBeats the Venture and Foresight group at Schibsted is acting as a VC arm for the media colossus Schibsted. Although I don’t think they have done any investment yet, the team is led by Azhar, a former entrepreneur, investor, technologist, and the list goes on. He also writes , a brilliant blog/newsletter, which you should definitely subscribe; Schibsted Media Group (London): azeem ‘The Exponential View’ : they have been in business for 45 years now, and their portfolio is composed of companies like , , , , and many others, including even ; Sequoia Capital (Bay area) Orbital insight Horizon robotics Domino Data Lab Mapillary Mu Sigma a less than a month old $80M European VC with a focus on data technologies. They recently closed the first investment in , a French startup specialized in deep learning technologies. They also teamed up with Firstmark to launch ‘ ’; Serena Data Ventures (Paris): Heuritech Data Driven Paris a super angel investor group led by and Kenges Rakishev, with a quite nice portfolio: , , , to name a few; Singulariteam (Tel Aviv): Moshe Hogeg Zirra General Robotics Beyond Verbal the Stanford StartX fund offers to invest 10% of any venture round raised by companies that go through the university-affiliated startup program. They were investors in companies like (ca. $13M in the last round) and (acquired by Salesforce); StartX (Bay area): Gauss Surgical PredictionIO a division of , the investment arm of Two Sigma, TSV got done important deals especially in the robotics space (e.g., , , ), but also , , and ; Two Sigma Ventures (NY): Two Sigma Investments Jibo Rethink Robotics 3Drobotics Kasisto Anki Ufora they announced the second fund last year (target at $250M), after having invested the first fund of $80M in companies like , , , and others; Visionnaire Ventures (Bay area): ModBot Savioke LeapMind Content Analytics under the supervision of and , the fund has invested in particularly interesting companies, such as , , and ; White Star Capital (London): Christian Hernandez Eric Martineau-Fortin mnubo Aire Key.me : a fund which invests only in later stage companies according to their Investors in , , , and , they also offer in partnership with Carnegie Mellon (CMU) a Scholarships in Entrepreneurship and Innovation; Wildcat Venture Partners (Bay area) Traction Gap Framework . Kabbage RocketFuel WorkFusion Amplero they invest in ‘ ’ ( ), but up to date I have no idea of what companies they invested into or the size of the fund; Xerion Investments (NY): Applied Artificial Intelligence-as-a-Service AIaaS , and (the guy behind the fundraising business at ) have raised a second fund of about $100M to invest in AI startups like , , and . Check out also this really nice post from their MPs (‘ ’); Zetta Venture Partners (Bay area): Mark Gorenberg Jocelyn Goldfein Ash Fontana AngelList Tractable Kaggle Domino Growing up in the intelligence era investors in , they joined the forces a few months ago with other 9 angel and venture firms to launch an AI-accelerator in China. Zhen Fund (Beijing): Vincross Momenta.ai, Polly.ai, Image Credit: Looker_Studio/Shutterstock there is a fund which does not make AI investments, but it is an . It is called , and it claims to be entirely powered by an artificial intelligence engine. has ‘ ’ (or at least it claims to have them) and it was created by anonymous founders. Well, even if the reality is that it is simply another , I thought it was at least worthy to mention it because the concept is intriguing, regardless of the real value of the fund. A final remark: AI investor ‘ The AI VC ’ THE AI VC Unicorn Identification Capabilities RocketAI Furthermore, it is useful to notice that AI is sometimes seen as an . Indeed, to “offer investors pure exposure to a concentrated portfolio of companies that derive most, or all, of their revenues and growth from AI”. Well, let’s see what will happen! asset class Smith & Williamson has just launched a fund IV. Other Works This is my personal list. I have performed an extensive research work, but I still might be missing someone or misleading some deals or investment strategies ( ). However, I believe this is a temporary list because in five years everyone will be investing in AI. I will try to keep this list as updated as possible in the meantime, so check it out from time to time to see if anyone new is on the list. please let me know if this is the case! Furthermore, many more interesting articles and researches exist about this topic. I would highly recommend you to have a look at the incredible works and have done in the past 6–9 months about investing in AI ( and some of the articles on VC, , and here for AI investors ). Tracxn is also a good source for . CB Insights Anand Sanwal here here here for CVC with a healthcare focus major investors in AI startups On the other side, I would suggest to also check the by the team ( , , ), in addition to the famous MI infographic made by Shivon Zillis, (see above Bloomberg Beta). European machine intelligence landscape Project Juno Libby Kinsey Sebastian Spiegler Laure Andrieux *Note: the initial list published in Feb. 2017 was made by 77 funds. Thanks to David Kelnar, Nathan Benaich, Alex Flamant, Andreas Thorstensson, Mike Collett, for the post-publication comments. — — Follow me on Medium Look at my other articles on AI and Machine Learning: Artificial Intelligence Explained What you are too afraid to ask about Artificial Intelligence (Part I): Machine Learning 13 Forecasts on Artificial Intelligence
