Google has officially launched Gradient Ventures, which is a new Google venture fund specifically for artificial intelligence. Gradient Ventures is to focus on providing technical mentorship to early-stage startups aiming to establish themselves in the burgeoning field.
Other Google venture capital resources consist of capital and unique access to “experts and bootcamps in AI”. According to the Googlers, “Many members of our team are engineers, so we’re familiar with the journey from big idea to product launch.” They intend to help their portfolio companies tackle the engineering challenges for creating products. These products are to bring easement to artificial intelligence usage of today and the future.
Anna Patterson is the managing partner, who is to oversee the investments and activities of the Gradient Ventures. She is the former Vice President of AI’s engineering. The team of the new venture fund further includes Shabih Rizvi, an engineer of Google, who is also a former partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
On the other hand, Astro Teller of Moonshots, X, Matias Duarte as design VP of Google, and Dr. Ray Kurzweil are to play the role of advisors for the startups of Gradient Ventures. Ankit Jain is one of the founding partners of the venture, and is a Director of Engineering for Google. Kelsey Buntjer is playing the role of the founding manager of operations for the venture.
The already confirmed four portfolios of the Google venture are in the following:
- Algorithmia – It is a group of researchers, developers, and organizations contributing to the marketplace based on algorithms, models, and functions.
- Cogniac – This serves software for easy creation and visual composition of Convolutional Neural Network models.
- Cape – It virtualizes the drone hardware for the users to fly drones remotely.
- Aurima – This is a company that is presently working on developing alternative sensing modality compatible with deep AI modeling.