adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

Investment

EDC prepared to commit $250 million to investment matching program – BetaKit

Published

 on


Export Development Canada (EDC) has begun deploying funds into Canadian companies through its newly launched investment matching program.

EDC’s executive vice president and chief business officer Carl Burlock told BetaKit the organization is “prepared to put up to” $250 million CAD into the matching program, which it began piloting last month.

“What we’re hearing now from companies is that they’ve been cautious. Now, they’re starting to look at where growth may come from.”

As of June 9, 40 companies have approached EDC about the matching program, 16 have been approved, and five deals closed. EDC told BetaKit less than $15 million in matching investments has been distributed so far.

300x250x1

Since being revealed and trialled in April, several components of the program have been adjusted. Non-exporting companies are now eligible and there is no minimum for how much EDC will invest per deal, although there is a maximum of $5 million CAD.

The program deploys matching capital in companies that are raising funding from the private sector, including institutional investments, venture capital, private equity, and corporate partnerships.

EDC established the investment matching program in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, looking to quickly provide equity funding to Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises.

“We’re really pleased with [the program]. It’s part of our role to try and act quickly and to adapt,” Burlock told BetaKit. “These are small, higher growth companies, so it prevents them from losing momentum.”

RELATED: Details on EDC, BDC issuing larger loans to medium-sized businesses through expanded BCAP

Burlock said the program has exposed companies to EDC that the Crown corporation may not have otherwise invested in. EDC usually focuses on companies looking to export their products or services outside of Canada, but the organization has opened its investment matching program to both domestic and export-oriented companies. It also broadened the parameters of the program, making a number of technology companies more eligible for funding.

“In a normal course of business, [these companies] had funding plans that were going forward,” he said. “Now we’re able to step in and help some of them close or accelerate those funding plans. There’s quite a nice diversity of different industry segments.”

Some tech startups that have already received commitments from the investment matching program include biometric device company Invixium, which recently raised $3 million in financing. Invixium closed its deal with support from EDC’s matching program.

The investment matching program is additional to EDC’s BCAP offerings.

EDC also participated in Clearpath Robotics’ $40 million Series C through the matching program. Clearpath develops autonomous vehicles for the mining, defence, and agriculture sectors. Other companies that have closed funding from the EDC program include SaaS startup 7Shifts, Maison Le Grand, and Fody Foods Co.

EDC’s investment matching program is similar to BDC Capital’s Bridge Financing Program, which is also meant to support venture-backed companies with matching investments. According to the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) CEO Michael Denham, BDC Capital recently doubled the budget for this program to $300 million. BDC has completed 23 deals worth $45 million, as of June 10. The key difference between the EDC and BDC programs, however, is that BDC Capital will accelerate more capital into General Partners.

EDC’s investment matching program is a follow on to its Business Credit Availability Program (BCAP) offerings, all of which Burlock said were “designed specifically with economic uncertainty in mind.” EDC’s loan guarantee through BCAP gives businesses access to up to $6.25 million CAD in short-term liquidity to cover “critical” expenses. Portions of the BCAP are also being facilitated by BDC.

RELATED: EDC executive vice president on the agency’s COVID-19 response

The investment thesis for the matching program is to join other investors that can lead a funding round. EDC will not lead rounds itself. Since piloting the program in the early spring, Burlock said EDC has learned it was important to “move with speed,” and depend on the companies’ existing investors and their analyses.

“It’s really to bring funds into existing investors or syndicates, so that this allows us to move faster compared to when you lead it yourself and you’re a new investor, and it’s a longer process,” Burlock said.

The EDC executive noted that the value in the investment matching program is that it brings new companies into EDC’s international network, allowing these companies to scale their growth and expansion efforts.

“[The investment matching] also allows us to bring confidence into a round, because what we heard was that companies might have had term sheet [and] they might have been in the process of doing a raise, and then all this economic uncertainty comes around,” Burlock said. “So the fact that we’re able to step in and work with investors brings confidence.”

EDC is willing to work with a number of institutional investors for the program, including existing partners and those it hasn’t yet worked with.

Outside of the investment matching, Burlock said EDC has also seen strong uptake in its accounts receivable insurance program. That program was made more flexible to include SaaS companies and to maintain coverage in situations where a buyer’s credit deteriorates as a result of the pandemic.

RELATED: BDC Capital reveals more details on investment matching program for VC-backed companies

Some members of the tech community previously expressed concern that SaaS and other traditional tech companies with revenue below $4 or $5 million would not be able to take advantage of EDC’s COVID relief programs, as they would not traditionally qualify for bank loans or lines of credit. Speaking with BetaKit in April, Burlock said the loan guarantee was designed to be “wide open” in terms of criteria.

“Initially, there was a tremendous amount of uncertainty,” Burlock said. “I think there’s still uncertainty in terms of where the global economy is going to go. What we’re hearing now from companies is that they’ve been cautious. Now, they’re starting to look at where growth may come from.”

Image source Export Development Canada via Facebook.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Investment

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

Published

 on

By


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.

300x250x1

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:

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Investment

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

Published

 on

By


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.

300x250x1

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.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Investment

Canada to tighten foreign investment rules for AI, other sectors

Published

 on

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.


Click to play video: 'Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud'
4:47
Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud

300x250x1

 


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.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending