With the backing of multiple VCs, Snowflake is supercharging its AI investment efforts and building a new AI hub in the Bay Area.
Data and cloud computing company Snowflake is expanding its AI funding programme to $200m as it opens up what it calls an AI hub in Silicon Valley.
The company is expanding the Snowflake Startup Accelerator programme to back more startups focusing on industry-specific AI, with the backing of investors Capital One Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Blackstone Innovation Investments, General Catalyst, Greylock Partners, Hetz Ventures, NewBuild Ventures Capital, NTTVC and Virtue.
Amazon Web Services has also committed up to $1m in credits on its platform to startups going through the programme.
It is the latest corporate in the past 18 months to make nine plus figure allocations to support AI startups. Cisco’s investment arm launched a $1bn AI fund in June last year, while IBM launched a $500m AI venture fund in late 2023.
Through its corporate VC unit, Snowflake Ventures, the company has backed AI startups like large language model developer Mistral, AI operating system developer Anaconda, AI agents technology developer Contextual AI and AI vision models developer Landing AI.
Snowflake also announced it was setting up what it calls the Silicon Valley AI Hub – a campus due to open this summer in Menlo Park, where startups, developers and others can congregate and collaborate on AI projects.
Fernando Moncada Rivera
Fernando Moncada Rivera is a reporter at Global Corporate Venturing and also host of the CVC Unplugged podcast.
