Visa’s $100M Boost for Generative AI Startups

Visa, which is considered one of the largest payment platforms globally, is taking a close look at AI as it plans to set up new funds to invest in generative AI ventures.

On October 2, 2023, Visa announced a new $100 million generative AI initiative to invest in companies that are focused on developing generative AI technologies and applications that are related to commerce and payments.

Visa’s global corporate investment arm, Visa Ventures, will help track the $100 million investment. The arm has been supporting innovation in commerce and payments since 2007.

The work of generative AI is to produce different kinds of content, including imagery, text, audio, and synthetic data. Popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard use this to help their AI generate human-like writing.

According to the statement released on their website, Visa said,

• As a pioneer of AI in payments since 1993, Visa considers this initiative an extension of the company's leadership in AI use to drive innovation in payments, create value for partners and clients, and enable and empower global commerce. Generative AI is an emerging subset of AI that is built on Large Language Models (LLMs) to develop artificial general intelligence capable of generating text, images, or other content from large sets of existing data when given prompts. “While much of generative AI so far has been focused on tasks and content creation, this technology will soon not only reshape how we live and work, but it will also meaningfully change commerce in ways we need to understand,” said Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Visa Inc.

• This initiative will be led by Visa Ventures, the global corporate investment arm of Visa. Visa Ventures has been investing in and partnering with companies driving innovation in payments and commerce since 2007. “With generative AI’s potential to be one of the most transformative technologies of our time, we are excited to expand our focus to invest in some of the most innovative and disruptive venture-backed startups building across generative AI, commerce, and payments,” said David Rolf, Head of Visa Ventures, Visa Inc.

Via email, the head of Visa Ventures, David Rolf, explained to TechCrunch that generative AI has the potential to be one of the most transformative technologies of our time. 

He also added that Visa Ventures “had a lot of flexibility” with regards to how many investments it would make out of the new fund and the average check size.

He said,

• Given the early stage of the industry we’d expect to make a range of smaller investments of a few $M.

• That said, we have the ability to make larger investments where there is a strong rationale to do so.