According to SEC filings, AI bigwigsAndrew Ng of AI fund, a startup incubator that supports small teams using AI to solve critical problems, plans to raise more than $120 million for its second fund.
AI Venture Fund II has raised $69.75 million from 13 partners, with about $50 million still to be invested, documents show.
Source: The image is generated by AI, and the image is authorized by Midjourney
Enda Wu is the founder of the Google Brain deep learning program, co-founder of Coursera, and one of the most recent appointments to Amazon's board of directors. He became one of the most recognizable figures in the AI community when he became chief scientist at Baidu in 2014. He left Baidu in 2017 to start driving several AI startups, including the DeepLearning.ai course and Landing AI, a startup developing AI tools for manufacturing companies.
Ng launched his AI fund in 2018, raising $175 million, serving as the incubator's GP and leading its direction. (In the aforementioned SEC filing, he is referred to as the "managing member of the general partner" of AI Venture Fund II.) The idea is to fund companies at the seed and Series A stages of their lifecycle, allowing teams to work in relative anonymity until they're ready and connecting them to Ng's extensive professional network.
Greylock Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Sequoia Capital, and SoftBank Group were among the original backers of the AI fund. crunchbase lists 38 portfolio companies, including AI observability platform WhyLabs, Ng's own Landing AI, and AI app building tool Baseten.
The $120 million AI Venture Fund II will be much smaller than the first round of AI funds. Still, it's more than double the $50 million Ng originally hoped to raise.
This could be another potential sign of an AI bubble, especially as the noisy generative AI space within it may be shrinking.