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Calgary sets quarterly venture capital investment record – Calgary Herald

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Alberta attracted $466 million worth of investment in the first quarter of 2022, $433 million of which was in Calgary alone

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Calgary is on pace to shatter all previous venture capital investment records in the city and the province.

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Alberta attracted $466 million worth of investment in the first quarter of 2022, $433 million of which was in Calgary, according to the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association Q1 report on Tuesday. In all of 2021, there was $561 million worth of venture capital investment in Alberta, $500 million of which was in Calgary.

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“We knew it was going to be a significant quarter for the province of Alberta, but we weren’t expecting this much activity this fast in 2022,” said Economy, Jobs and Innovation Minister Doug Schweitzer. “It really is a testament to the growth of the industry and also the maturity of the industry in Alberta.”

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In 2020, the province had a record year of venture capital growth over 12 months at about $450 million worth of investment.

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Kim Furlong, CEO of CVCA, credited investments made by the province years ago to make Alberta’s risk-tolerant environment more appealing to startups and investors.

The numbers were boosted across the board due to record investment in Canada, but Calgary is starting to take a bigger piece of the pie. Calgary still trails Toronto ($2.19 billion), Montreal ($928 million) and Vancouver ($454 million) in total dollars, but it is closing the gap, especially in Western Canada.

Over the past several years, Calgary has seen rapid growth in the startup sector and venture capital investment, setting records every year.

Brett Colvin, CEO of Calgary startup Goodlawyer, said there has been a dramatic shift in the approach to the sector. When he was originally looking at launching his company he was considering Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver, but three years ago the environment began to change in his hometown.

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He added that successes such as Neo Financial, Benevity, Solium Capital and others will only help grow the sector more.

“There is this palpable energy within government, business and the wider community that startups and technology will be key drivers to our city’s future and long-term success,” he said. “Fundamentally, the attitudes have shifted and the opportunity — that it seems like a lot of people are in agreement with — for the long-term success of our city lies in startups, lies in tech. It’s an incredible time to be a startup founder in Calgary.”

Still, he would like to see the return of the Alberta Investor Tax Credit, which he said was critical to early-stage investment for his company. The credit was phased out by the government beginning in 2019.

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Schweitzer pointed to other initiatives the province has put its weight behind to stimulate growth, acting on the advice of the Innovation Capital Working Group. These moves include injecting $175 million into the Alberta Enterprise Corp. to increase liquidity in the sector and attract outside investment, efforts to improve the talent pool and improve mentorship through accelerator projects.

Minister of Jobs, Economy and Innovation Doug Schweitzer on Tuesday, March 8, 2022.
Minister of Jobs, Economy and Innovation Doug Schweitzer on Tuesday, March 8, 2022. Photo by Ed Kaiser /Postmedia

Edmonton was the beneficiary of just $18 million in venture capital investment in the first quarter. Schweitzer said Calgary began its pursuit of these dollars and startups before the provincial capital. He pointed to organizations such as Calgary Economic Development pushing this mission, noting Innovate Edmonton is attempting to do the same.

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Furlong, however, warned there are some signs of potential slowdown in the next few quarters due to factors such as inflation and wage pressures, geopolitical pressures including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and an overheated market. She said it is important for people to continue pushing for growth in the sector.

“Let’s celebrate the success that we saw,” she said. “Regardless of what’s on the horizon, let’s stay the course, because the types of companies and what it produces — jobs, exports — the talent that it attracts, all of it put together is essential for us thinking about how we transform Canada into an innovative economy.”

jaldrich@postmedia.com

Twitter: @JoshAldrich03

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Amazon completes $4B Anthropic investment to advance generative AI – About Amazon

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Amazon concludes $4 billion investment in Anthropic.

Customers of all sizes and industries are using Claude on Amazon Bedrock to reimagine user experiences, reinvent their businesses, and accelerate their generative AI journeys.

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The work Amazon and Anthropic are doing together to bring the most advanced generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technologies to customers worldwide is only beginning. As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, we and Anthropic announced that Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models and has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure, easy access to the industry’s widest choice of high-performing, fully managed foundation models (FMs), along with the most compelling set of features (including best-in-class retrieval augmented generation, guardrails, model evaluation, and AI-powered agents) that help customers build highly-capable, cost-effective, low latency generative AI applications.

Earlier this month, we announced access to the most powerful Anthropic AI models on Amazon Bedrock. The Claude 3 family of models demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities. Industry benchmarks show that Claude 3 Opus, the most intelligent of the model family, has set a new standard, outperforming other models available today—including OpenAI’s GPT-4—in the areas of reasoning, math, and coding.

“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS. “Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI. Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”

Global organizations of all sizes, across virtually every industry, are already using Amazon Bedrock to build their generative AI applications with Anthropic’s Claude AI. They include ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, CelcomDigi, Clariant, Cloudera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Degas Ltd., Delta Air Lines, Druva, Enverus, Genesys, Genomics England, GoDaddy, Happy Fox, Intuit, KT, LivTech, Lonely Planet, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, M1 Finance, Netsmart, Nexxiot, Parsyl, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, the PGA TOUR, Proto Hologram, Ricoh USA, Rocket Companies, and Siemens.

To further help speed the adoption of advanced generative AI technologies, AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture recently announced that they are coming together to help organizations—especially those in highly-regulated industries including healthcare, public sector, banking, and insurance—responsibly adopt and scale generative AI solutions. Through this collaboration, organizations will gain access to best-in-class models from Anthropic, a broad set of capabilities only available on Amazon Bedrock, and industry expertise from Accenture, Anthropic, and AWS to help them build and scale generative AI applications that are customized for their specific use cases.

Deepening our commitment to advancing generative AI, today we have an update on the announcement we made to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership position in the company. Last September, we made an initial investment of $1.25 billion. Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion. To learn more about the broader strategic collaboration between Amazon and Anthropic, of which this investment is one part, check out the stories below:

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Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment – TechCrunch

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Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September. The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back.

The September deal put $1.25 billion into the company in exchange for a minority stake, and certain tit-for-tat agreements like Anthropic continuing to use AWS for its extensive computation needs.

Amazon reportedly had until the end of the first quarter to decide whether to increase its investment to a maximum of $4 billion, and here we are just before the deadline, and the company has decided to throw in the maximum amount.

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Anthropic’s AI models are one of very few that compete at the highest levels of capability (however you define it) yet are available at scale for enterprises to deploy internally or in user-facing applications. OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini are the others up there, but upstarts like Mistral may soon threaten that fragile triumvirate.

Lacking the capability to develop adequate models on their own for whatever reason, companies like Amazon and Microsoft have had to act vicariously through others, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic. The two have reaped immense benefits by allying with one or the other of these moneyed rivals, and as yet have not seen many downsides.

What we can take from Amazon’s decision to invest the maximum after (one must assume) getting a pretty close look at how they make the AI sausage over there is, really, pretty scant.

It makes too much strategic sense for these companies, which possess enormous war chests saved up for exactly this purpose (outspending rivals when they can’t out-innovate them), to pour cash into the AI sector. Right now the AI world is a bit like a roulette table, with OpenAI and Anthropic representing black and red. No one really knows where the ball will land, least of all the companies that couldn’t predict or create this technology themselves. But if your bitter enemy puts their chips down on red, it only makes sense for you to bet on black.

Especially if you can bet on black at a discount — which is what Amazon got here, since it could invest at Anthropic’s September valuation, which is most certainly lower than it is today.

That said, if things were looking sketchy over there — the way they must have looked at Inflection before Microsoft pounced on it — Amazon could have backed out or just invested less than the full supplemental $2.75 billion. But that might have sent a confusing signal no one wants getting out there, least of all existing multibillion-dollar investors.

We know Anthropic has a plan, and this year we’ll find out what Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other multinational interests think they can do to monetize this supposedly revolutionary technology.

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Canada to tighten foreign investment rules for AI, other sectors

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Canada will require foreign companies to warn the government in advance before making investments or acquisitions in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and space technology, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing an interview with Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne.

The move will aid the government in conducting a national-security review before transactions get too far advanced and would-be investors may be restricted in their access to target companies’ user data or other property while the inquiry is taking place, the report said.


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The tougher rules will also apply to investments in critical minerals and potentially other sectors, Champagne said to Bloomberg.

Earlier this month, Champagne said Canada will crack down on foreign investment in the interactive digital media sector to stop state-sponsored actors from endangering national security.

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