Heaptalk, Jakarta — Global payments technology company Visa announced its plan to invest a $100 million venture fund in companies focused on developing generative AI technologies and applications in the commerce and payments sector (10/02).
The investment initiative will be led by Visa Ventures, the global corporate investment arm of Visa. The venture has been investing in and partnering with companies driving innovation in payments and commerce since 2007.
Head of Visa Ventures David Rolf conveyed, “With generative AI’s potential to be one of the most transformative technologies of our time, we are excited to expand our focus to invest in some of the most innovative and disruptive venture-backed startups building across generative AI, commerce, and payments.”
Generative AI is an emerging subset of AI that is built on large language models (LLMs) to develop artificial general intelligence. The technology is capable of generating text, images, or other content from large sets of existing data based on given prompts.
This measure demonstrates Visa’s pledge to drive innovation in payments, creating value for partners and clients. Having used AI in payments since 1993, the company would also like to enable and empower global commerce through the latest technology.
Chief Product and Strategy Officer of Visa Jack Forestell said, “While much of generative AI so far has been focused on tasks and content creation, this technology will soon not only reshape how we live and work, but it will also meaningfully change commerce in ways we need to understand.”
Visa facilitates transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions, and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories. The company had issued 4.2 billion cards worldwide as of March 31, 2023. Total transactions reached $14.5 trillion in the year through June 30, 2023. Visa operates at least 100 million merchant locations by the end of 2022.
