Canada-based Element AI secured $102m on Wednesday in the largest ever series A round for an artificial intelligence technology developer, with corporates Microsoft, Intel, Tencent, Nvidia and Hanwha all investing.
The round was led by venture capital fund Data Collective and included financial services firms National Bank of Canada and Business Development Bank of Canada, Real Ventures, Fidelity Investments Canada, which operates as a branch of financial services group Fidelity, and undisclosed sovereign wealth funds.
On the corporate side, internet group Tencent was joined by Hanwha Investment, Intel Capital, Microsoft Ventures and Nvidia GPU Ventures, respective subsidiaries of conglomerate Hanwha, chipmaker Intel, software producer Microsoft and graphics technology provider Nvidia.
Element AI is developing AI technology for use by businesses in sectors such as cybersecurity, finance, manufacturing, robotics, logistics and transportation that will link to and enhance the insights they get from their existing data.
The series A cash will be invested in large-scale international AI projects as Element AI seeks to further develop its technology.
Naveen Rao, general manager of Intel’s Artificial Intelligence Products Group, said: “In addition to hardware, we are committed to developing the software ingredients necessary to accelerate complex, data-intensive processes.
Such an endeavour means investing in the best minds in the world and Element AI has the intellectual horsepower to help us all advance artificial intelligence like never before.”
Jeff Herbst, Nvidia’s vice-president of business development, added: “Element AI is doing amazing work enabling AI for a wide variety of industries, leveraging Nvidia’s deep learning platform.
“Element AI will benefit by continuing to leverage Nvidia’s high performance [graphics processing units] and software at large scale to solve some of the world’s most challenging issues.”