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The Story: Yesterday, IBM announced its plans to invest $500 million into funding artificial intelligence startups.

The venture arm of one of the world’s largest tech companies will look to fund companies focused on helping business customers, specifically.

In an interview with Axios’s Kia Kokalitcheva, IBM’s senior vice president of software and COO Rob Thomas, said that, “If you look at IBM over the last three years, we're a dramatically different company that we were three years ago." He explains that the company’s VC arm plans to invest across stages with no specific target for how many or how few investments the company would like to make.

Hugging Face, who just raised its Series D, and HiddenLayer, are just two of the GenAI startups that IBM has already invested in. According to a statement from Thomas on IBM’s website, the AI industry is “slated to unlock nearly $16 trillion in productivity by 2030.”

Thomas anticipates that, different to several previous technological transformations, the AI trend could be led by global companies located outside the United States. IBM could take a unique angle in exploring these opportunities first.

IBM has lagged behind Big Tech competitors like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in investing in AI so far, but with yesterday’s announcement, the company is poised to make big moves as it looks to play catch up.

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