Founder and-chairman Azim Premji’s fund, ‘Premji Invest’ may invest $50 million in Paris-based generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup Poolside.ai.
The investment will be part of the $400 million in raising for the startup, while Poolside raised $126 million in August in a massive seed round.
The current round will happen at a valuation of $2 billion, according to a recent report by TechCrunch.
Poolside is the third global AI that Premji Invest went for after Canva and Hippocratic AI in recent months, as it looks to capitalise on the generative AI boom.
Poolside’s LLM model
Poolside is training a large language model (LLM) and focused on software development and allowing it to improve by completing millions of tasks in tens of thousands of real-world software projects.
It has articulated a three-step approach, wherein it will first assist developers in building software by using AI.
It will then allow anyone to build software by making AI-led human-assisted interactions the next abstraction for building software and then finally generalise these capabilities beyond software to all other fields.
The Paris-based startup was founded in April 2023 by Jason Warner and Eiso Kant. Poolside is the third significant foundational model startup to come out of Paris, after Mistral and H, which have also raised hundreds of millions from investors.
Premji Invest and Poolside.ai did not offer comments for this story.
Other investments of Premji in AI
Earlier ‘Premji Invest’ invested in Australian graphic design firm Canva as part of a secondary transaction.
In March 2024 it co-led Hippocratic AI’s $53-million Series A round, with investors such as General Catalyst, Memorial Hermann Health System and SV Angel.
