SA国际传媒

Editor鈥檚 note: This is part of a series in which we interview active investors in artificial intelligence. Previous interviews were with investors at General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners and Accel.听听

New York-based investment firm has invested around $4 billion in artificial intelligence companies over the past five years.

That鈥檚 according to , a partner at the firm who has led some of its key investments in the AI sector.

鈥淓very business is having a transformative moment,鈥� Mathew said in a conversation with SA国际传媒 News, speaking to the new wave of innovation unleashed by the launch of late last year. Such generative AI models have raised the bar that will 鈥渞eformat all of software,鈥� he said.

Mathew joined Insight in February 2021 and made his very first investment at the firm leading the Series B in , a machine-learning operations company used by for tracking its transformer models. Seven months later, Weights & Biases went on to raise a Series C that valued it as a new unicorn.

Insight was already one of the most and into the first half of 2022, based on an analysis of data. The firm added in 2022 alone, for a total of 750 primary investments with $50 billion in capital commitments, according to the firm.

The firm reportedly has , but is said to be scaling back on the $20 billion target size of fund 13 and deploying funds over a longer time horizon. Its funding pace in 2023 has from its peak in Q1 2022, per SA国际传媒.

Most of Insight鈥檚 funding to its AI portfolio companies has come from its recent funds. Those are fund 11, a $9.5 billion fund announced in 2019, and fund 12, announced in 2022 and the firm鈥檚 largest at $20 billion (at a time when private company financings generally slowed).

Beyond the data stack

Insight is tackling AI investments at three distinct layers. They include the modern data stack, MLOps (machine-learning operations) and generative AI applications.

The firm led the Series C in data orchestration platform in 2022.聽 However, the data stack is pretty well invested at this time, Mathew said. 鈥淎 lot of our focus definitely shifted toward this next generation of machine-learning operations and specifically how LLMs are being built,鈥� he said.

The acquisition of by is indicative of a data stack company becoming a key player in MLOps, he said.

惭补迟丑别飞鈥檚 in AI include data observability platform , AI model performance management company , and synthetic data creation company .

Other investments in MLOps include data collaboration company , customer data platform , and analytics company , which is built on top of and Databricks.

Generative AI apps

As for what he鈥檚 looking for now as he seeks out generative AI companies to invest in, Mathew said it鈥檚 鈥渃ompanies that are building domain-specific models on top of private data sets with great user experiences and workflows.鈥�

On the applications side, the firm is interested in vertical opportunities in financial services and health care as well as software 鈥� namely robotic process automation 鈥� that will be reimagined by this technology. Two portfolio companies reinventing robotic process automation with LLMs and transformers are and .

Insight is also interested in horizontal opportunities like , for which it led the $125 million Series A 鈥� a month before the launch of ChatGPT. The firm also invested in entertainment dubbing service , which translates not only voice but tonality into 40 different languages. And it led the Series A for , which provides an avatar built by a generative model for video communications.

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