Venture capital firm Air Street Capital, which focuses on investments in early-stage artificial intelligence startups, has raised $121m for its second fund, with the fundraising attracting the support of Spotify Technology’s Chief Executive Officer Daniel Ek, according to a report by Bloomberg.
Jeff Dean, an AI exec at Alphabet Inc’s Google has also backed the London-based fund, which has already placed bets on startups in the US and Europe working on data analytics and semiconductors. The fund is also focusing on drug discovery, an area of renewed interest for investors looking for AI opportunities.
In August, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz led a $200m investment in Genesis Therapeutics, a California startup applying AI to uncover new medicine, with BlackRock and Nvidia also joining the investment. Nvidia also invested $50 million in Recursion Pharmaceuticals in July.
The report cites estimates from Morgan Stanley as suggesting that using AI to find promising drug candidates could lead to $50 billion in new sales, despite previous efforts in this field yielding mixed results.
