[편집자주] ‘Global Startup Scene’ is a corner that delivers news on major global venture capital (VC) and startups that occurred during the week. In addition, we will point out the impact and outlook for the domestic startup market.
Investment and cooperation from global big techs are rapidly flocking to the Indian AI (artificial intelligence) market. NVIDIA, a leading American AI chip company, is strengthening its presence in the local ecosystem by joining hands with major Indian venture capital (VC) companies to speed up the discovery of promising early-stage companies.
As India has emerged as a ‘next-generation AI battleground’ based on the active support of the Indian government and the fastest-growing pool of AI developers and startups outside the United States, competition among big techs for leadership is intensifying.
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NVIDIA discovering Indian VC and AI startups
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According to a number of foreign news outlets, including CNBC and TechCrunch, on the 20th, NVIDIA is collaborating with ‘Activate’, a venture fund specializing in early-stage AI investment, to target Indian AI startups from an earlier stage. Activate plans to invest in 25 to 30 AI startups with its first fund ($75 million). Portfolio companies will have priority access to NVIDIA’s technical support and expert network.
Separately, NVIDIA is also expanding its partnerships with leading Indian VCs such as Peak XV, Z47, Elevation Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, and Accel India.
India is a market with a rapidly growing pool of AI developers and startups, and it is evaluated that its strategic importance is growing as Nvidia expands the adoption of chips and computing software. This can also be interpreted as a ploy to dominate the long-term demand that arises as AI native companies grow through close collaboration with founders from the very beginning.
“As startups grow, their use of AI computing tends to increase,” Activate founder Akrit Baisi told TechCrunch. “Technical involvement at an early stage is significant in creating future business opportunities.” According to NVIDIA, more than 4,000 AI startups in India are already participating in NVIDIA’s global startup support program ‘Inception’.
NVIDIA’s actions are also in line with the ‘IndiaAI Mission’ promoted by the Indian government. The mission aims to strengthen India’s AI capabilities and expand funding for AI entrepreneurs. India is pursuing a strategy of expanding AI competitiveness not only to talent and data, but also to infrastructure and the semiconductor supply chain. In fact, Prime Minister Modi’s government is accelerating the establishment of a domestic supply chain by approving $18 billion worth of semiconductor projects in September last year under the plan to develop India into a global technology powerhouse.
Amid this policy drive and infrastructure expansion trend, Open AI also set out to dominate the Indian ecosystem. Recently, OpenAI signed a partnership with India’s Tata Group and secured 100 megawatts (MW) of data center power capacity suitable for AI operations in India. We plan to expand this to 1 gigawatt (GW) in the future. This collaboration is part of OpenAI’s ‘Stargate’ project to build AI infrastructure globally.
Meanwhile, India is holding the ‘AI Impact Summit’ in New Delhi for 5 days from the 16th to this day. According to the Indian government, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Antropic CEO Dario Amodei, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, and Microsoft President Brad Smith will attend the event. Leaders of 20 countries, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, will also participate. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was originally scheduled to attend, but withdrew at the last minute, citing “unforeseen circumstances.”
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French AI company Mistral AI acquires Koi App… Europe regains AI sovereignty
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French AI company Mistral AI conducted its first merger and acquisition (M&A) by acquiring French infrastructure startup Coyep. It is evaluated as a move in line with Europe’s ‘AI sovereignty’ trend, which seeks to reduce dependence on US big tech.
According to foreign media such as TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), this acquisition is interpreted as a strategy for Mistral AI to increase operational efficiency and strengthen computing capabilities. There is also an analysis that Mistral AI, known as a large-scale language model (LLM) developer, has launched a ‘full-stack’ strategy encompassing everything from models to infrastructure with this transaction.
Mistral AI is a generative AI company based in Paris, France, and has advocated for ‘European version of open AI’. It is one of the leading candidates discussed as an alternative to reduce dependence on American AI companies and infrastructure. The acquired company, Koieb, was founded in 2020 by three former French cloud company Scaleway employees, and has grown by building a ‘serverless’-based platform that helps developers focus on data processing and service operation without the burden of server operation. As AI services become more sophisticated and the demand for computing resources increases, the importance of serverless infrastructure has also been highlighted.
With this acquisition, 13 Coiep employees and three co-founders, Yann Leger, Édouard Bonlieu, and Bastien Chatelard, will join the MistralAI engineering organization starting next month.
Mistral AI explained that with the addition of Koiep’s cloud computing platform and manpower, developers can run and expand AI services without being hindered by infrastructure issues, allowing them to focus on code development and service implementation. Mistral AI unveiled ‘Mistral Compute’, an AI cloud infrastructure service, in June last year, and plans to accelerate related development through this acquisition.
Mistral AI is also speeding up the expansion of its cloud business. It recently announced plans to invest $1.4 billion (approximately 2.0292 trillion won) in a Swedish data center, demonstrating its will to respond to the demand for alternatives to U.S.-centric infrastructure.
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Thrive Capital forms the largest $10 billion fund in history… Securing AI and space investment ammunition
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U.S. VC Thrive Capital raised more than $10 billion (about 14.46 trillion won) in a new fund. It is the largest since the company was founded.
According to foreign media such as Bloomberg and TechCrunch, this fund is Thrive Capital’s 10th fund, and its name is ‘Thrive X’. The market estimates that through the formation of this large-scale fund, Thrive has secured the financial capacity to expand its investment scope to include space, robotics, and life sciences, focusing on AI applications and infrastructure.
Thrive announced that a large-scale oversubscription occurred during this fund raising process. The explanation is that as demand for investment increased, new investment proposals worth billions of dollars were rejected.
This fund was formed as the corporate value of Thrive’s major investments, such as Open AI, Stripe, and SpaceX, continues to rise. Thrive’s other representative investments include Databricks, Anduril, and Cursor.
“The AI boom is still in its infancy,” Thrive founder Joshua Kushner told Bloomberg. “The winners will be bigger than we can imagine.”
This large-scale procurement is also interpreted as another signal. In particular, as the possibility of an IPO (initial public offering) surrounding Open AI and Space There are also observations that if the two companies are listed, an unprecedented amount of funds could be returned to LPs.
Established in 2009, Thrive has differentiated itself by investing heavily in a small number of companies and making large follow-up investments at the growth stage. Instead of limiting the number of new investment companies to about 12 each year, we take a strategy of focusing capital and support on selected companies over the long term. It also incubates (directly discovers and develops) companies, and so far, 12 new companies have been created and spun off, and at least 6 of them are said to have grown into unicorns (unlisted companies with a corporate value of more than $1 billion).
Meanwhile, Kushner’s older brother is Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US President Donald Trump.
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