Corporate ventures steal the spotlight at SF Tech Week

For the tech-curious, venture capitalists (VCs) and founders, this week’s SF Tech Week delivered. But the week’s hottest ticket was a “Scaling Over Cocktails” event hosted by IBM Ventures and a16z speedrun, which drew more than 1,700 people to the waitlist, suggesting that corporate venture is driving a lot of interest.

According to Emily Fontaine, Global Head of Venture Capital at IBM, the surge in corporate investment interest is impossible to ignore. “The tide has changed for corporate ventures,” she told IBM Think in an interview. Founders want corporate investments on their cap table at an earlier stage. And IBM, which launched a USD 500 million enterprise AI fund dedicated to the next generation of enterprise technology, has already invested in dozens of startups globally.

As with everything in AI, competition is fierce. “There’s a ton of capital on the street,” Fontaine said. “Everyone’s got money to spend.” With IBM’s investment, however, startups are able to tap into massive operational support, thought leadership and, most importantly, access to clients and some of the largest companies in the world—a crucial yet delicate part of scaling for startups.

“The most difficult thing founders have is executing deals and getting them through procurement for enterprise clients,” said Fontaine. With its network of clients and partners, IBM can speed up deals, said Austin Flon, a Platform and Growth Partner at IBM Ventures. 

Tomás Hernando Kofman is the Co-Founder of Not Diamond, a company building automatic prompt optimization and intelligent AI model routing, which recently completed its early-stage funding round with backing from many of the world’s most prominent AI scientists and firms, including IBM. Kofman originally connected with the IBM Research team, which had been exploring related topics. “We share a similar thesis: the more we can leverage the strengths and weaknesses of many diverse models instead of relying on a single monolith, the more we move towards a safer, more performant future for AI,” he said in an interview.

The pace of building an AI startup is blazing fast, especially in San Francisco where the hustle and energy remain unmatched. “There are a million things to build,” he said, “which is why we force ourselves to stay laser focused on a long-range vision and understanding our problem space better than anyone else in the world.”

Fontaine, who met with hundreds of startups this year, is particularly excited about vibe coding, multimodal strategies and reinforcement learning. And though a report by the Bank of England sparked concerns this week about an AI bubble, Fontaine isn’t convinced.

“I don’t think there’s an AI bubble,” she said. “There’s a lot of excitement, and we can’t predict the future—but the best safeguard is rigorous diligence and truly understanding the companies you invest in.”