Bessemer pledges USD 1bn for global AI deals
Bessemer Venture Partners, a US-based early-stage investor currently expanding a longstanding presence in India, has earmarked USD 1bn for artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups globally.
It comes as the advent of sophisticated chatbots, such as ChatGPT, has intensified investor interest in AI development. Indeed, Bessemer's announcement coincided with the launch of its own chatbot, ChatBVP.
Bessemer also recently demonstrated its commitment to India by raising a USD 220m country fund. The India vehicle will make initial investments and the firm's global funds - the most recent one closed on USD 3.8bn last September - will join later rounds.
Bessemer has backed more than 65 Indian start-ups in the past 15 years, primarily in enterprise, financial, consumer, and healthcare domains. Its key assets in the country – Swiggy, BigBasket, and PharmEasy – have made a feature of their usage of AI-enabled analytics.
The AI strategy will take a high-risk, high-reward approach with a focus on cutting-edge technologies. Bessemer described AI as “nearing escape velocity” as it penetrates use-case scenarios such as drug discovery and satellite imagery.
The plan includes developing a virtual community, where AI founders can tap into a network of operating advisors, share field notes, and get preferred access to compute and models. This will include a series of specialised AI workshops as well as ChatBVP.
“We aren’t interested in faster horses, we want to invent automobiles,” Talia Goldberg and Samer Dholakia, both partners at Bessemer, said in a joint statement. “We aren’t funding features or marginal improvement – we are looking for breakthroughs. And the breakouts will be built ground up with AI, by those that are agile, technical, and unencumbered by the status quo.”
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