DBT Bureau
Bengaluru, 5 June
Global cybersecurity giant Cisco has launched a corpus of $1 billion for investing in startups focussed on artificial intelligence (AI). With this AI-focussed fund, Cisco joins the league of large firms that are investing in AI startups as it plans to cash in emerging demand in this space.
“Cisco Investments has launched a $1 billion Global AI Investment Fund to advance industry innovation and customer readiness, and support Cisco’s strategy to connect and protect organizations in an AI-powered future,” the company announced in the Cisco Live event.
The company has already committed an investment amount of around $200 million for investing in startups including Cohere, Mistral AI, and Scale AI among others.
All their AI startups- Scale AI, Mistral AI, and Cohere- are valued at more than $1 billion on the back of their innovative AI solutions. While AI data startup Scale AI is valued at nearly $14 billion, the foundation model developers Cohere and Mistral are planning to raise funds from investors at a valuation of $5 billion each.
Foundation AI models are built using huge volumes of data and can be applied across a wide range of use cases.
Cisco has already made over 20 AI-focused acquisitions and investments in the last several years for building capabilities in AI, generative AI, and machine learning areas. It has integrated AI solutions into its portfolio of solutions, the company said in a statement.
All global technology giants have been betting big on AI space as the technology world sees more business solutions powered by AI. Microsoft’s acquisition of OpenAI, which is the creator of ChatGPT, shows the rush among big technology firms to gain the first-mover advantage. Google is planning to invest around $100 billion to stay ahead of its competitors.
