Visa Launches $100 Million Venture Fund for Companies Using Generative AI

Global digital payment company Visa has announced it is investing $100 million in companies harnessing generative AI technologies and applications for commerce and payments.

Visa views this initiatve to be an expansion of Visa’s leadership in using AI to drive innovation in payments, generate value for partners and clients, and enable and empower global commerce.

Visa has been a pioneer in the use of AI in payments since 1993. The development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) capable of producing text, graphics, or other content from massive quantities of existing data in response to prompts is known as generative AI, an emerging subset of artificial intelligence (AI) based on massive Language Models (LLMs).

The global corporate investment arm of Visa, Visa Ventures, will oversee this project. Since 2007, Visa Ventures has partnered with and invested in businesses that are advancing innovation in payments and commerce.

David Rolf, head of Visa Ventures said, “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.”

The initiative is about understanding the disruptive potential of generative AI as much as it is about revenue generation, according to Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa.
“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,” he explains.