Global AI Conclave: Andrew Ng's AI Fund eyes investments in India

Dr. Andrew Ng, Founder, DeepLearning.AI and Co-Founder, Coursera

Andrew Ng's venture studio AI Fund is actively evaluating opportunities and investments in India, the AI pioneer said during a fireside chat at CNBC-TV18 and Moneycontrol Global AI conclave on December 16.

"We have active activities right now in India, exploring one specific application. And I think that there'll be many of those opportunities in India and around the world in the future," Ng said. However, he declined to share further details on it.

AI Fund is a venture studio that Ng launched in January 2018 with a corpus of $175 million. It partners with entrepreneurs to build companies rapidly. On its website, AI Fund said it "aspires to play the role of a minor co-founder."

The studio says that its "deep bench" of AI pioneers, operators, and entrepreneurs accelerates market validation, offers profound technical expertise, provides business support, and facilitates the recruitment of a "strong core team" within its AI ecosystem.

"There's one active opportunity that we were blessed to find and we wouldn't be doing it if not for the fantastic partners that we found and a fantastic CEO that we're privileged to be supporting. We'll see how that goes. If it goes well, hopefully, I can say more about it in the future," he said.

On its website, AI Fund mentions that it is "particularly excited" by sectors such as human capital, health and wellness, next-generation enterprise, and MLOps (Machine Learning Operations). Among its portfolio include startups such as DataHeroes, 10Web, Baseten, Bhuma, and FourthBrain.

These comments come at a time when venture capital investors are rushing to pour capital into the nascent but rapidly growing field that is upending the current tech landscape.

Ng said a lot of attention is currently on the technology or the infrastructure layer, following the recent announcements by tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and upstarts such as OpenAI.

However, for the infrastructure and tooling layer to be successful, the applications built on top of them have to be even more successful, Ng said.

"We all need the applications to make even more money so that we can pay the infrastructure builders... This is one huge sector and there is much less competition intensity on the application layer," he said.

Palo Alto Networks presents the CNBC-TV18 Moneycontrol Global AI Conclave, in collaboration with EY as the Knowledge Partner and Google, Yotta Infrastructure, and Reliance Industries Limited as Associate Partners, with Townhall serving as the Technology Partner.