California’s major credit card company Visa (NYSE: V) is launching a US$100 million venture fund for generative AI startups, an initiative aimed at solving system issues online that will be led by its Visa Ventures investment arm.
On Monday, the head of Visa Ventures David Rolf said that the company was excited to utilize the funding for working with startups and improving the company’s performance as a result. He said that generative AI was one of the most transformative technologies of our time.
Visa says the funds are intended to help companies involved with developing generative AI create innovative new solutions for problems related to commerce, payments and financial technology infrastructure.
Generative AI focuses on generating new content rather than analyzing or processing pre-existing data. The AI subset built on large language models can produce original text, images, video and other media.
Visa says it has been using AI for its payment systems since the technology’s very early days in 1993. VisaNet + AI is its most recently developed system, a suite of services powered by the technology designed to prevent fraud and make online payments more secure.
VisaNet is capable of processing 76,000 transactions per second, caters to approximately 3.6 billion account holders and analyzes trillions of dollars in payments volume with AI analytics.
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“While much of generative AI so far has been focused on tasks and content creation, this technology will also meaningfully change commerce in ways we need to understand,” said Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell.
Other major California tech companies that have invested in AI include NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), Adobe Inc. (NASDAQ: ADBE), Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM).
Visa shares have steadily risen by almost 25 per cent in the past year and they are currently trading for US$230.36 on the New York Stock Exchange.
rowan@mugglehead.com
