Visa Earmarks $100m Seeds For Generative AI Startups In Africa

The card payment corporation, Visa has unveiled a new $100 million initiative called Generative AI Ventures to invest in the next wave of businesses working to create generative AI applications and technology that will influence the future of commerce and payments.

The initiative is an extension of the company’s leadership in AI use to drive innovation in payments, create value for partners and clients, and enable and empower global commerce.

The initiative will be led by Visa Ventures, the global corporate investment arm of Visa, which it claims has been investing in and partnering with companies driving innovation in payments and commerce since 2007.

Generative AI, like the popular OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is an emerging subset of AI that is built on Large Language Models (LLMs) to develop artificial general intelligence capable of generating text, images, or other content from large sets of existing data when given prompts.

In a statement issued by the company’s chief product and strategy officer, Visa Inc, Jack Forestell, said: “While much of generative AI so far has been focused on tasks and content creation, this technology will soon not only reshape how we live and work, but it will also meaningfully change commerce in ways we need to understand.”

Head of Visa Ventures, Visa Inc, David Rolf, added that, “With generative AI’s potential to be one of the most transformative technologies of our time, we are excited to expand our focus to invest in some of the most innovative and disruptive venture-backed startups building across generative AI, commerce and payments.”