Tag: invests

  • Abu Dhabi Investment Authority invests $500M in India’s Lenskart

    Abu Dhabi Investment Authority invests $500M in India’s Lenskart

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    New Delhi: Omnichannel eyewear unicorn Lenskart has signed a definitive agreement with Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) to raise $500 million from the authority.

    The investment is an extension to last year’s funding round, helping Lenskart maintain its $4.5 billion valuation.

    The company said that the capital will be deployed to deepen its presence in Asia and the Middle East.

    ADIA’s investment includes some secondary purchase of shares from some early backers of Lenskart.

    The eyewear company has so far raised $1.5 billion in primary and secondary rounds, according to reports.

    Founded in 2010, Lenskart ships over 10 million pairs of eyewear every year and has over 20 million app downloads, 300 home eye test representatives as well as over 1,100 stores across India, Singapore, and Dubai, the company said last year.

    Lenskart is backed by Falcon Edge Capital, SoftBank, KKR, Temasek, Premji Invest and Kedaara Capital, among others.

    In June last year, the eyewear unicorn took a majority stake in Japanese eyewear brand Owndays in a deal that was reportedly around $400 million.

    This took the merged firm to reach 13 markets in Asia including India, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan.

    The company said it will continue its rapid expansion in India and South East Asia to serve the mass to mid-premium segments.

    (Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by Siasat staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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    ( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

  • Microsoft invests billions of dollars in ChatGPT developer OpenAI

    Microsoft invests billions of dollars in ChatGPT developer OpenAI

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    San Francisco: Microsoft on Monday announced a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the developer behind AI-driven ChatGPT which has become a rage.

    The tech giant, which infused $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, did not divulge the investment amount in the “third phase of our long-term partnership with OpenAI”. Earlier reports had claimed Microsoft may infuse up to $10 billion in OpenAI.

    “We formed our partnership with OpenAI around a shared ambition to responsibly advance cutting-edge AI research and democratise AI as a new technology platform,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft.

    “In this next phase of our partnership, developers and organisations across industries will have access to the best AI infrastructure, models, and toolchain with Azure to build and run their applications,” Nadella added.

    Microsoft will now increase its investments in the development and deployment of specialised supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s groundbreaking independent AI research.

    It will deploy OpenAI’s models across its consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology.

    This includes Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service which empowers developers to build cutting-edge AI applications through direct access to OpenAI models, said the tech giant.

    “The past three years of our partnership have been great,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

    “Microsoft shares our values and we are excited to continue our independent research and work toward creating advanced AI that benefits everyone,” he added.

    As OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across research, products and API services.

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    ( With inputs from www.siasat.com )