In a year that’s seen one out of every four dollars of venture funding go to an artificial intelligence startup, a historically un-sexy breed of investor has dominated the field: corporations.
And not just the tech behemoths. It’s no secret that Microsoft, Google, Nvidia and Oracle have collectively invested billions of dollars into AI startups that turn around and spend the capital on the investors’ cloud services or chips. But it turns out that enterprise software firm Salesforce has been the most active corporate investor of all in terms of the number of deals, if not in dollar volume: Since May, the company has backed 11 AI startups, including two of the best known large-language model developers, Anthropic and Cohere, which received shoutouts in the company’s earnings call yesterday (See chart below.)