Business Insider: A wave of AI 'acquihires' is coming. Here's who could be looking for deals.
In March, Microsoft signaled its intention to push further into consumer AI by notching an unusual deal with Inflection AI, the chatbot startup the company invested in, paying $650 million to license its AI software after poaching Inflection's cofounders and much of its staff.
AI enterprise giants such as Databricks and Snowflake are the current frontrunners for buying companies building in the application layer, Shmuel Chafets, founding partner at Target Global, told BI.
Databricks has been on a spending spree in the past year, and its previous acquisitions of MosaicML and DBRX "show how it's looking to acquire companies building a strong AI infrastructure," said Sivesh Sukumar, VC at Balderton.
Other startups training large AI models like Anthropic, Ideogram, and Pika, are always looking for talent specializing in building and optimizing those models, and could make acquisitions to get it, said AIX Ventures founding partner Shaun Johnson.