The biggest venture financing rounds during 2024 involved AI companies. Reviewing the characteristics of such financing rounds, combined with the performance of our portfolio startups, and our firm’s corporate advisory AI projects (completed and ongoing), I worry that venture investors expect corporate AI adoption will be fast and large-scale. In contrast, corporate AI spending, though growing, is more measured than VCs predict.
Robotaxis and autonomoustrucks are the two autonomous vehicle use cases that receive the most attention. AI is a key enabling technology for both. To achieve the determinism required in mobility, #AV software platforms incorporated a combination of statistical and symbolic AI. A new crop of AV startups, led by Wayve and Waabi, received large financing rounds for their “end-to-end” deep neural network approaches similar to those used in generative AI. Could these approaches result in vehicles that are cheaper to produce and operate than those utilizing the approaches used to date, adhere to regulations, and be accepted by autonomous vehicle users?
My previous post in the corporate venture capital (CVC) series provided a broad historical perspective on the sector. In this…
In the previous post I introduced a five-dimensional framework to employ while setting up a corporate venture group and discussed…
In the first part of the series on corporate venture capital I explored how the disruption of institutional VCs (IVCs)…