(Jan 30): Nvidia Corp has joined a US$150 million (RM709.2 million) capital infusion for chatbot-builder Kore.ai, making its latest investment in an AI sphere that’s become reliant on its high-end chips.

FTV Capital led the round for Kore.ai, which plans to use the financing to develop more virtual assistants for global brands, the company said Tuesday. The Orlando-based startup counts enterprise customers including Coca-Cola Co, Airbus SE and Roche Holding AG, it said. LG Electronics Inc runs its chatbot to support online shoppers for its products.

Nvidia, an existing Kore.ai backer before its latest round, has struck a number of deals with up-and-coming AI firms over the past year, including investments in Hugging Face, Cohere and Mistral AI. Nvidia, whose chips are fundamental to the training and development of generative AI, is among those betting on the technology’s potential since OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted more than a year ago. It’s made over a dozen investments in AI startups in 2023 alone, mainly in companies that build using its sophisticated processors.

Its backing is an endorsement for Kore.ai, which is counting on AI going mainstream among enterprises looking to automate their business. It currently automates 450 million daily interactions involving about 200 million consumers, and is headed for an initial public offering, the company said.

Kore.ai’s revenue has grown at triple-digit percentages in past years, founder and chief executive officer Raj Koneru told Bloomberg News, without divulging specifics. “We’ll have the scale and process in place to be able to have an IPO in about two years,” he said.

Koneru, who was born in India, founded the Orlando, Florida-based company in 2014. It helps enterprises with business interactions — including with users, employees and customers — helping reduce costs. Businesses use its pre-built or customised virtual assistants across sectors like banking, health care and retail.

Recently, it’s begun adopting generative AI, or artificial intelligence that can generate text, images or other content in response to prompts. Kore.ai integrates commercial and open-source large language models, such as those built by OpenAI, Alphabet Inc’s Google, Meta Platforms Inc, Anthropic and Cohere, and then fine-tunes those platforms or trains them further with new data for specific tasks.

The conversational AI market that Kore.ai targets could reach US$377 billion in revenue by 2032, up from US$66 billion in 2023, Gartner Inc estimates.

“OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT has opened the world’s eyes to what’s possible,” Koneru said during a phone conversation to discuss the funding. “But we are still only at the tip of the iceberg.”