A brassy new venture capital investor, going by the ugly acronym Mang, has been making a lot of noise in Silicon Valley. Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia and Google, four of the five biggest US companies by market value, have become the dominant investors in the hottest artificial intelligence start-ups. In doing so, they have been increasingly muscling out the traditional Sand Hill Road VC merchants, who like to think they know best how to fund the future.
Of the fearsome foursome, Microsoft has made the biggest bets, investing $13bn in OpenAI and also backing Inflection AI. Amazon and Google have both invested heavily in Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI members. And Nvidia has backed Inflection AI, Databricks and Cohere and co-invested with Google in Hugging Face and Runway.
Apoorv Agrawal, a partner at investment firm Altimeter, calculates that the Mangs participated in data and AI start-up investment deals worth $23bn last year — about 30 per cent of the total. However, as Agrawal notes, for the Mangs these investments are as much strategic as financial.