Coursera co-founder raises AI fund worth $175 mn

The founder of Google Brain deep learning project and co-founder of online education firm Coursera has raised a $175 million artificial intelligence (AI) fund.

Andrew Ng said in a blog post that the AI Fund is backed by Japan’s SoftBank Group and Silicon Valley venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners.

“We… will be sequentially initiating new businesses that use AI to improve human life. As we grow these businesses, we also hope to help many of you enter the field of AI, and do the important work of building an AI-powered society,” Ng wrote in the post.

Ng joined Baidu as chief scientist in 2014 and it is then that he rose to fame in the machine learning community. He left the company to launch two AI projects–Deeplearning.ai course and Landing.ai, a programme that aims to bring AI to manufacturing companies.

The AI Fund is providing capital to Landing.AI and is scouting for more projects to invest in.

Ng will be the general partner at the new fund. Eva Wang will be partner and COO, and Steven Syverud will also serve as partner. Wang was formerly a partner at Fenwick & West. Syverud had led the development of Coursera’s specializations product and was CEO of Sycamore.

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