Toyota fund invests on AI startups, firms that refine everyday processes
Toyota Motor Corp's primary capital raising fund is buying startups that help the Japanese automaker refine everyday techniques by bringing sharper supply-chain administration and robotics to the factory flooring, a fund executive said.
The Silicon Valley-based Toyota AI Ventures fund, with $200 million under management, has so far committed to 36 early-stage startups, including self-driving vehicle car software firm Nauto, factory video analytics company Drishti and air mobility firm Joby Aviation.
Toyota, the world's largest automaker by vehicle sales, and many car corporations such as for example Volkswagen AG will be funnelling cash into startups to greatly help gain an edge in artificial intelligence due to investor interest shifts to self-driving autos.
For instance Toyota, which has dozens of factories all over the world, wants to have the ability to quickly show the lessons learned at one plant across different plants so that efficiencies are maximised, Jim Adler, the founding managing director of the fund, told Reuters in an interview.
"If you start looking at cloud processing, for instance, and cloud robotics, and fleet learning, when one robot learns something, all of those other robots automatically learn that element," he said.
Adler, a ex - Lockheed Martin rocket engineer and a good serial entrepreneur, said that as the fund and the automaker function closely collectively, the fund had an excellent degree of independence from Toyota because taking every investment possibility to the carmaker's administration would be too much process.
"We are in the edge of the Toyota ecosystem," said Adler. "Being between your outside world and the inside globe of Toyota, we are this type of semi-permeable membrane that provides outside influence in to the company."
The automaker this season started Woven Capital, an $800 million capital raising fund to make growth-level investments in companies including those in the Toyota AI Ventures portfolio.
Source: japantoday.com
