Since Anna Patterson founded Gradient Ventures (GV), the artificial intelligence (AI)-focused fund owned by internet and technology conglomerate Alphabet, in 2017, she has served as a managing partner for the unit.
Alphabet was formed in 2015 to act as an umbrella company for its alpha – internet technology provider Google – and its bets – diversified business interests.
The 2015 realignment involved the firm’s early-stage investment arm, Google Ventures, and its growth-stage unit, Google Capital, being rebranded as GV and CapitalG, respectively.
Google Assistant Investments was also launched in March 2018 with the founder Ilya Gelfenbeyn as its head. The fund, as its name suggests, focuses on digital voice assistance ecosystem.
By early 2019, Gradient had already invested in 20 companies, and all been in relatively early-stage rounds. The latest of which include:
- Leading a $4m seed round for human resources platform software developer Sapling in February 2019.
- Leading a $7m series A round for English pronunciation training app developer Elsa in February 2019.
- Contributing to a $10.5m series A round for business messaging service NumberAI in January 2019.
- Leading a $7m series A round for autonomous dispatch and routing software developer Wise Systems in December 2018.
- Co-leading a series A 18m round for AI-empowered automated bookkeeping app developer Botkeeper in November 2018.
- Leading a seed $5m round for AI-empowered predictive analytics platform developer Canvass Analytics in August 2018.
- An $11m series A round for US-based testing system developer Test.ai in July 2018.
GV is investing directly from Google’s balance sheet and can commit up to $8m a time, and it has the flexibility to pursue follow-on investments. The fund also has an engineering rotational program in place with Google, pairing its top talent with Gradient’s portfolio companies.
The largest cumulative investment by GV, which now has $2.4bn under management, over the course of 2017 was likely in 3D printing technology provider Desktop Metal. GV led the company’s $45m series C round in February before returning for its $115m series D in July.
The unit’s exits included upscale coffee chain Blue Bottle, for which Nestlé paid $700m for a majority stake, and dark data platform Lattice, which was bought by Apple for $200m. Big data software provider Cloudera, Gram-negative infection therapy developer Spero Therapeutics and monoclonal antibody developer Arsanis respectively raised $225m, $194m and $136m from their initial public offerings.
Speaking to the New York Times in October last year, Patterson said she considered the AI hype to be “synonymous with the ‘90s” which she had experienced before, for example, “high-tech company” or “dot-com company”. Startups back then claimed to be high-tech companies in order to attract VCs’ attention. “Sometimes I am seeing companies that say they are AI companies, but one of the lines that I draw is if the maths can be done in Excel, it is not an AI company,” she determined.
Patterson sits on the board of several companies – Square, Algorithmia, PullRequest and Test.ai. Before founding GV, Patterson had been a vice-president of engineering in AI at its parent since 2010, having joined Google in 2004 as a director of engineering where she helped build and grow Android and was involved in Google Play’s launch.
Furthermore, she was Google’s search index system TeraGoogle’s architect and inventor. This project increased search results’ index size to more than 10 times.
As an entrepreneur, Patterson co-founded Cuil, a search engine that categorised web pages by content, in 2005. After writing Recall.archive.org, a search engine of internet archive, she authored a piece titled Why writing your own search engine is hard in the computer magazine ACM Queue. She was also the co-creator of a search engine dubbed Xift.
Patterson received the Technical Leadership ABIE Award in 2016 for her outstanding work in AI and promoting diversity in the tech industry, and she made GCV’s Powerlist last year.
She holds a bachelor’s in electrical engineering and computer science at Washington University in St Louis and a PhD in computer science from University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. After completing her PhD, she took up a research scientist role at Stanford University in AI, where she collaborated with Carolyn Talcott, a renowned computer scientist, and John McCarthy, one of the founders of AI.
