Early stage investor Wing Venture Capital has closed a $600 million fund to back startups focused on artificial intelligence.
(Bloomberg) — Early stage investor Wing Venture Capital has closed a $600 million fund to back startups focused on artificial intelligence.
The Palo Alto, California-based firm will use money from the fund to continue to invest in companies that develop AI tools with a business use case, founding partner Peter Wagner said in an interview.
While VC firms have been interested in AI for years, momentum has accelerated since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT language tool gripped public attention, according to Wagner.
Wagner said it is becoming “increasingly difficult to find anything interesting to do in B2B technology that isn’t making use of AI in an important and fundamental way.”
There have been a string of AI-related mergers and acquisitions in recent weeks, most notably Databricks Inc.’s purchase of generative AI platform MosaicML for $1.3 billion, with predictions of more to come from tech industry executives.
Wing, which was an early backer of $59 billion cloud-computing firm Snowflake Inc., has already invested in a number of AI companies including language tool Copy.ai, software provider Gong and data processor Pinecone.
Founded in 2013 by Sequoia Capital and Accel alumni, Wing focuses on writing checks for the seed and Series A stages of startups’ funding. The firm raised $450 million for its third fund in 2020. Other technology companies it has backed include data management platform Cohesity and cybersecurity specialist Shape Security.
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