Visa announced today that it plans to invest $100 million in companies creating generative AI technologies and applications that will impact the future of commerce and payments.
The investments will be made through Visa Ventures, the card giant's 16-year-old global corporate investment arm.
Since 1993, Visa has been a pioneer in the application of AI in payments. For the unaffiliated, generative AI is an emerging subset of AI trained on large sets of existing data to generate text, images, or other content when given text prompts.
Via email, he told TechCrunch that Visa Ventures had a lot of flexibility in terms of how many investments it would make out of the new fund and average check size.
In August TechCrunch spoke with Marie-Elise Droga, who was appointed as Visa's new head of fintech late last year. At the time, she said, her team 'often collaborates' with the Visa Ventures team - serving as sort of a scout engine for Visa's venture arm.