Tech giant IBM on Wednesday (November 8) announced a $500 million venture fund to invest in a range of AI companies — from early-stage to hyper-growth startups — that focus on accelerating generative AI technology and research for the enterprise sector.
“Led by a dedicated team at IBM with decades of combined experience as highly successful investors and enterprise AI experts, the fund will provide each startup with opportunities to develop meaningful partnerships with IBM, while gaining operational expertise on product and engineering and go-to-market strategies,” the company said in a statement.
IBM is renowned for delivering proven enterprise AI technology to organisations worldwide. This fund's launch is expected to expand IBM's AI partnership network, fostering innovation in collaboration with companies leveraging its AI and data platform, WatsonX, and creating enduring value for AI leaders and clients.
In August, IBM participated in the $235 million Series D funding round of Hugging Face, a leading open-source collaboration platform for the machine learning community. IBM's contributions to Hugging Face reportedly included hundreds of open models and datasets, including the Geospatial Foundation Model, a groundbreaking open-source AI model developed in collaboration with NASA.
Clem Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, praised the collaboration, stating, "I am convinced that they'll be able to accelerate their impact on AI with the IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund."
IBM's dedication to AI security was highlighted through its participation in HiddenLayer's Series A funding round, the largest Series A funding raised by a cybersecurity company focused on protecting AI this year.
Chris Sestito, CEO and Co-founder of HiddenLayer, acknowledged IBM's contribution, saying, "Our partnership will help us bring our AI threat detection capabilities to the most cutting-edge companies in the world."
IBM's latest announcement builds on the momentum and market adoption of its AI and data platform, WatsonX. The company's strategy is focused on leveraging both third-party and in-house AI models to accelerate open innovation in AI. This includes the recent general availability of the first models in the WatsonX Granite model series, aimed at advancing generative AI in business applications and workflows.
IBM has also confirmed that standard contractual intellectual property protections for IBM products will apply to IBM-developed WatsonX AI models. Additionally, the company announced plans to host Meta's Llama 2-chat 70 billion parameter model within WatsonX, furthering its commitment to open innovation.
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