Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Sanabil, the tech investment arm of Saudi's sovereign wealth fund, has become a key backer of both startups and VC funds with many traditional limited partners starved of capital. Over the past decade, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has racked up investments in some of Silicon Valley’s hottest projects, dumping money into Uber, electric carmaker Lucid and augmented reality startup Magic Leap among others. Now, ahead of a reported $40 billion push into artificial intelligence, it's taken stakes in France’s AI champion Mistral, Databricks and a handful of smaller AI startups.
The tech arm of the Public Investment Fund (PIF) seems to be one of the few entities with a checkbook large enough to underwrite the continued growth of some of the world’s largest AI startups. Mistral raised $640 million at a $6 billion valuation in June, and Databricks raised $500 billion at a $43 billion valuation earlier this month, while investors plowed over $70 billion into AI startups in the year to date, according to Pitchbook. “Sanabil invested at our Series B indeed, as part of a fully global round involving capital from the US, the EU, Asia and the Middle East,” said Mistral cofounder Arthur Mensch in a statement to Forbes .
Saudi’s Sanabil was the only state-owned investor disclosed in the round apart from investment bank BPI France. Databricks did not respond to a request for comment but also disclosed that Sanabil is a.
