FOMO has Microsoft ‘throwing billions’ at AI, say venture capitalists

Toronto – June 18, 2024

As AI use becomes more mainstream and better funded, tech companies will race to keep up, or they will be left behind. Chief among them is Bill Gates-backed tech giant, Microsoft.

In a discussion on AI investment that took place at Collision in Toronto, Alfred Chuang (pictured above), co-founder and general partner of Race Capital, said Microsoft could be expected to heavily prioritize the industry, as it looked to avoid repeating past mistakes: 

“If you look at [Microsoft’s] history, it’s gonna be blatantly obvious what’s going to be happening. Microsoft, this time around, they missed the web, they missed mobile, they’re not missing AI. That’s why they’re throwing billions at it.” 

Alfred was joined in conversation by Latitude Capital founder Ansaf Kareem, and both investors agreed that anyone looking to invest in – or raise money for – an AI startup should be striking while the iron is hot.

“There’s no better time to raise money in AI. Valuations are high. Everybody’s enthusiastic to put money to work to get it going,“ said Ansaf.

But Ansaf warned that wouldn’t last forever: “Take advantage of the opportunity today to be able to fundraise and prepare yourself for the inevitable, which will be a more disillusioned state. Not to say that the technology won’t continue to advance, [but] Bill Gates says that we overestimate what technology can do in one year and underestimate what it can do in 10 years. And I think that’s the most succinct way to think about AI today.”

Alfred stressed that AI will do more than just disrupt the status quo – it will create new opportunities: “We’re seeing a lot of companies building in spaces where there were high labour costs and high services costs. They are shifting the paradigm completely from the existing software paradigm into something very brand new, that is creating a very new market … Everything will be AI-enabled or AI-related, so we’ll have to get on the train no matter what.”

Ansaf agreed, and said the ecosystem was seeing “a tale of two cities right now. Either you’re an AI company or you’re not, and I think if you are a software-based company, you have to have an answer to how you are leveraging AI. That’s just the reality. It’s almost redundant to say you’re a software company and not talk about AI.”

These comments were made at Collision – which is returning to Toronto for its sixth year – as part of a wider discussion on the changing face of VC. Global founders, CEOs, investors and members of the media have come to the city to make deals and experience North America’s thriving tech ecosystem.

More than 1,600 startups are taking part in Collision 2024 – the highest number of startups ever at a Collision event. 45 percent of these are women-founded, and startups have travelled to Toronto from countries including Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Ghana, Pakistan and beyond.

In total, more than 37,800 attendees have gathered at the event, as well as 570 speakers and 1,003 members of the media, to explore business opportunities with an international audience.

739 investors are attending Collision, including Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures; Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures; and Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, as well as nine companies on the Forbes Midas List, and 12 investors from those firms.

Top speakers at Collision include:

• Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
• Maria Sharapova, entrepreneur and tennis legend
• Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere (an AI for enterprise and large language model company, which raised US$450 million at a US$5 billion valuation in June 2024)
• Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi (a Canadian autonomous trucking company)
• Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password (a cloud-based password management tool)
• Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz (a cloud security platform)
• Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis (an AI and computer vision platform)
• Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (an AI chip startup)
• Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans
• ● Autumn Peltier, Indigenous rights activist

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Useful links

• Collision website: https://collisionconf.com/ 
• Collision media kit: https://collisionconf.com/media/media-kit  
• Collision images: https://flickr.com/photos/collisionconf 
• About Web Summit: about.websummit.com