In a recent financial filing, the OpenAI Startup Fund, the company’s early-stage AI investor, revealed that it has raised more than $44 million for its fifth Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), which is the largest one to date.

The Fund was established in 2021 and has a unique structure. Despite claiming that OpenAI is not an investor, it uses the OpenAI name. According to its website, it has raised funds from outside LPs, including Microsoft, a significant OpenAI sponsor, and “other OpenAI partners,” after being legally controlled by OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman at first. Earlier this year, Altman relinquished legal control to Ian Hathaway, his general partner.

VCs usually employ SPVs to invest outside of their primary fund and aggregate investor funds. The fund, however, has not disclosed the precise purpose of these monies.

This SPV “will be used to support a variety of existing portfolio companies and to make new investments,” an OpenAI representative told TechCrunch.

“SPVs allow us to allocate capital to high-potential investments opportunistically.”

This year, the fund, which was established in 2021, has disclosed five different vehicles totaling $114.2 million, continuing its impressive SPV streak:

Its website is minimal, with its most current news being published a year ago, despite the bustle of activity. The website only lists a small number of its investments, such as the AI note-taking software Mem and the legal AI business Harvey.

But contrary to what its website suggests, the fund is more active. Thrive Health, an AI health venture involving Sam Altman and Ariana Huffington, and the warm outbound business Unify are noteworthy investments this year.

Due to its AI code assistant Cursor, Anysphere is presently engaged in a VC bidding war, and the fund is also a seed investor in the company.

The Fund’s initial capital of $175.25 million, which was raised back in October 2021, is the sum of all these SPVs.

Zopper, an insurtech firm, announced in a note today that it has raised $25 million in a new round of funding led by Elevation Capital and Dharana Capital.

Dharana Capital has supported companies like NoBroker and Urban Company, while Elevation Capital is an active investor in the Indian fintech ecosystem.

The financing also included Blume Ventures, an existing investor. Other investors in Zopper include Creaegis, Bessemer Venture Partners, and ICICI Venture. To date, the business has raised a total of $96 million in equity investment.

The business from Noida will utilize the money to improve its insurance distribution network and expand its digital technology infrastructure. Additionally, the funds will improve Zopper’s device and appliance protection businesses’ post-sales and maintenance capabilities and speed up the expansion of the company’s current bancassurance products. The method used to sell insurance products through banking channels is known as the bancassurance model.

Banks and other businesses can use Zopper’s technology stack to package and market insurance products to their clients.

The company claimed in a statement that it presently has over 2,500 ecosystem actors and 40 insurance providers as partners.

At the moment, Zopper offers customized insurance solutions for consumers in India by integrating them into the ecosystem’s current digital channels.

“We are here to transform and automate the insurance distribution model in India, effectively, strategically and keeping customers in mind. We are mission-focused as a team. If we get this right, it will be transformational for the ecosystem and the country,” stated Mayank Gupta, Zopper’s chief operating officer.

As the e-commerce behemoth competes with Big Tech rivals to profit from generative artificial intelligence technology, Amazon.com (AMZN.O.) opened a new tab and invested an additional $4 billion in OpenAI opponent Anthropic.

Amazon’s stake in the company famed for its GenAI chatbot Claude has doubled, but it is still a minority investor, the business announced on Friday. Like Amazon’s prior $4 billion investment, it is made in installments, starting at $1.3 billion and taking the form of convertible notes.

According to sources who asked not to be named in order to discuss private topics, Anthropic is also in discussions with other investors in order to raise more money with Amazon’s support.

Amazon, which has steadily become Anthropic’s main cloud partner, is in intense competition with Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) to provide AI-powered tools for its cloud clients. As a major distributor of its most recent models, AWS is generating a substantial amount of revenue for Anthropic.

“The investment in Anthropic is essential for Amazon to stay in a leadership position in AI,” Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, stated.

The increased investment by the e-commerce giant in Anthropic highlights the billions of dollars that have been invested in AI startups in the past year as investors seek to profit from the technology’s surge in popularity following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.

Last month, Microsoft-backed OpenAI collected $6.6 billion from investors, potentially valuing the company at $157 billion and solidifying its place among the world’s most valuable private enterprises.

Anthropic intends to use Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and implement its core models. Securing expensive AI chips is a big concern for startups since the rigorous process of training AI models demands powerful processors.

“It (partnership) also allows Amazon to promote its AI services such as leveraging its AI chips for training and inferencing, which Anthropic is using,” Luria stated.

Amazon is one of the many so-called hyperscaler clients of Nvidia (NVDA.O), which opens a new tab and presently controls the market for AI chips.

However, through its Annapurna Labs branch, which Anthropic stated it was “working closely with” to help create CPUs, Amazon has been striving to develop its own chips. Additionally, Amazon has been working on developing its own AI model, code-named “Olympus,” which it has not yet made public.

Anthropic, which was co-founded by brothers Dario and Daniela Amodei, former executives at OpenAI, said last year that it had obtained a $500 million investment from Alphabet, which pledged to contribute an additional $1.5 billion over time.

The startup’s operations also make advantage of Alphabet’s Google Cloud capabilities.