Premji Invest may pump in $10-$15 million in San Francisco-based AI startup Galileo

Premji Invest is India’s largest VC/PE/Public markets fund with a single investor- billionaire philanthropist Azim Premji. It has assets under management (AUM) of $14.3 Billion, with investments in India and the US.

Premji Invest, the investment arm of Wipro Chairman Azim Premji, may invest $10-$15 million in artificial intelligence (AI) startup Galileo, according to sources familiar with the development.

The investment will be part of San Francisco-based Galileo’s Series B round of funding, according to one of the people cited above. The AI startup previously raised $18 million in a Series A round from a clutch of investors in November 2022, according to media reports.

Galileo, which helps data scientists and engineers make their machine learning models more accurate, is the latest AI bet for Bengaluru-based Premji Invest, as it looks to build a global portfolio of investments in the aftermath of the generative AI boom.

Galileo will be its fifth AI investment in the last year, after Hippocratic AI, Hugging Face, Canva and Poolside, in geographies as diverse as US, Australia and France.

“Galileo is in the MLOps, discoverability space, which is becoming increasingly important while building data-centric models,” a source said, when asked about Premji Invest’s interest in this space.

MLOps, short for Machine Learning Operations, refers to steps that combine machine learning, DevOps, and data engineering to make the developing, deploying and maintaining machine learning models more efficient.

Galileo describes itself as a Generative AI evaluation and observability stack for the enterprise. Put simply, its platform helps data scientists and machine learning engineers to identify, visualise and address data issues such as mislabeled data, edge cases, and other inconsistencies that can impact model accuracy.

It does this by finding and fixing problems in the data used to train these models. This ultimately helps build better AI systems that can make more reliable predictions.

Galileo’s observability stack helps iterate across complex prompts, numerous models, context data. It also keeps harmful responses away from users and monitors live traffic to a company’s GenAI application to identify vulnerabilities, debug and re-launch.

Its GenAI studio has three modules- Galileo Evaluate, Galileo Observe and Galileo Protect. Its founders- Kallol Chatterji, Atindriyo Sanyal and Yash Sheth, previously worked on building AI systems in firms such as Google, Apple and Uber.

Premji Invest and Galileo did not offer comments for this story.

Moneycontrol reported in July that Premji Invest may put in $50 million in Paris-based generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup Poolside.ai, as part of a $400 million round.

Earlier, Moneycontrol reported in April that Premji Invest is investing in Australian graphic design firm Canva as part of a secondary transaction, where it is buying shares tendered by employees. This was a bet on the booming creator ecosystem, where it believes Canva has an edge, per persons familiar with the fund’s thinking.

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 communicates with patients and collects patient information, conducts follow-ups, 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 on Hippocratic investment.

Premji Invest is also an investor in Hugging Face, a platform that helps users build, deploy and train machine learning models.

Premji Invest is India’s largest VC/PE/Public markets fund with a single investor- billionaire philanthropist Azim Premji. It has assets under management (AUM) of $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.