Wipro founder chairman Azim Premji’s fund Premji Invest may invest $50-$70 million in Australian graphic design platform Canva, according to sources familiar with the development, as per a Moneycontrol report.
This is part of Canva’s recent secondary market sale, where shares worth $1.6 billion changed hands between existing and new shareholders, at a valuation of $26 billion. Premji Invest may pick up shares tendered by employees in the sale.
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“$50-$70 million at a valuation of $26 billion for a company that will IPO in two years is a good deal. This is also a bet on the booming creator ecosystem, where Canva has an edge,” one of the sources confirmed to Moneycontrol.
Another source confirmed that it is increasingly looking at technology bets in the US, as it looks to capitalise on the generative artificial intelligence (AI) boom, and comes weeks after it invested in an American AI firm Hippocratic AI.
Last month, Premji Invest co-led Hippocratic AI’s $53 million Series A round, with investors such as General Catalyst, Memorial Hermann Health System and SV Angel. Hippocratic AI is building specialised voice-enabled generative AI agents for healthcare that communicates with patients and collects patient information, conducts follow-ups, executes tasks that involve clinical procedures.
“In the world of AI, we have shied away from applications that are building thin layers on top of large model providers. We’ve observed a ‘gap to the LLM app’ — building specialized vertical applications is exceptionally difficult. Data selection, data curation, model selection, task-specific training/RLHF, and elimination of hallucination are some examples of prominent issues that every entrepreneur needs to solve,” the fund said in a Medium post while talking about the Hippocratic investment.
India is one of the fastest growing markets for Canva and the company will continue investing heavily in this region, as per co-founder and COO Clifford Obrecht who also said that the country also has one of the largest creator communities on Facebook.
Canva recently acquired Affinity’s creative software suite, pitting itself directly against design software giant Adobe. Affinity Designer, Photo and Publishers have features like Adobe’s Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign software.
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