Wipro founder-chairman Azim Premji’s fund Premji Invest may put in $50 million in Paris-based generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup Poolside.ai, sources familiar with the development have told Moneycontrol.
This will be part of the $400-million round the startup is raising, one of the persons cited above said. Poolside raised $126 million in August in a massive seed round.
The current round will happen at a valuation of $2 billion, according to a recent report by TechCrunch, underscoring the investor euphoria in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence space.
Poolside is the third global AI bet by Premji Invest after Canva and Hippocratic AI in recent months, as it looks to capitalise on the generative AI boom.
Poolside’s LLM model
Poolside is training a large language model (LLM) that is focussed on software development and allowing it to improve by completing millions of tasks in tens of thousands of real-world software projects.
It has articulated a three-step approach, wherein it will first assist developers in building software by using AI. It will then allow anyone to build software by making AI-led human-assisted interactions the next abstraction for building software and then finally generalise these capabilities beyond software to all other fields.
The Paris-based startup was founded in April 2023 by Jason Warner and Eiso Kant. While Warner was previously an investor at Redpoint and chief technology officer (CTO) at GitHub, Kant is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded Athenian and source{d}.
Poolside is the third significant foundational model startup to come out of Paris, after Mistral and H, which have also raised hundreds of millions from investors.
Premji Invest and Poolside.ai did not offer comments for this story.
Premji’s AI bets
Moneycontrol reported in April that Premji Invest is putting in money in Australian graphic design firm Canva as part of a secondary transaction, where it is buying shares tendered by employees. This is a bet on the booming creator ecosystem, where it believes Canva has an edge, persons familiar with the fund’s thinking said.
In March, it co-led Hippocratic AI’s $53-million Series A round, with investors such as General Catalyst, Memorial Hermann Health System and SV Angel.
Hippocratic AI is building specialised voice-enabled generative AI agents for healthcare that communicate with patients and collect information, conducts follow-ups and executes tasks that involve clinical procedures.
“In the world of AI, we have shied away from applications that are building thin layers on top of large model providers. We’ve observed a ‘gap to LLM app’ — building specialised vertical applications is exceptionally difficult. Data selection, data curation, model selection, task-specific training/RLHF, and elimination of hallucination are some examples of prominent issues that every entrepreneur needs to solve,” the fund said in a Medium post while talking about the Hippocratic investment.
Premji Invest
Premji Invest is India’s largest VC/PE/public markets fund with a single investor — billionaire philanthropist Azim Premji. It manages assets worth $14.3 billion, with investments in India and the US.
It invests across asset classes — private equity, venture capital, public markets, liquid, and fund of funds. Some of its startup bets in India include Lenskart, FirstCry, Purplle and The Sleep Company. It is also an investor in US-based pharma firm Moderna.
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