Microsoft’s venture capital firm searches for next OpenAI

Microsoft (MSFT) is on the hunt for the next big artificial intelligence (AI) company. Michael Stewart, a managing partner at M12, Microsoft’s venture capital fund, sits down with Seana Smith and Madison Mills to discuss what the fund is looking for in its next big AI investment. Stewart says, “We’re looking at this from a long-term point of view because we are investing in startups that could take some number of years to grow into their business plans and I think reveal the technology’s promise, which is the basis of the excitement of so many investors and also entrepreneurs entering this space.” He explains Microsoft if looking for the real deal in its AI venture capital investments. “We are absolutely not looking for a pastiche of AI on top of a company we’ve all seen before. We apply a strategic lens to every new company we look at.” M12 seeks companies creating value and “doing something useful for the customer,” Stewart says, noting, “There’s four real factors that we analyze, and they’re called the four Ds: Data, dividends, distribution, and delight.” “Data really is the ingredient that makes the application or the service unique here. And paying off for the customer. If you’re an entrepreneur and a team and you’re not speaking to those two pieces, the data that you’re using to stay different and the results that you give back to the customer, it’s really like those two steps are the ones that entrepreneurs should focus on the most.” “Beyond that, getting to the customer, the distribution piece is where we have an advantage. Investing on behalf of Microsoft in startups [that] could reach these enterprise customers that are oftentimes inundated, flooded with so many new signals, [and] so many companies arriving in the space. We want to help use Microsoft as a partner in the future to reach those customers under the guardrail, safety, and reputation that Microsoft brings as a partner to them.” “The last is really delight, and that’s that’s kind of a qualitative factor that we think about. But it’s just the excitement that someone feels in using a new service. It can touch different kinds of AI startups differently, but it’s certainly something that it’s your voluntary choice to use an application [and] to work with a company because there is so much choice. We’re looking at something like 10,000 new AI startups created over the last two years. In that kind of environment, you’ve got to have customer enthusiasm and love as a key piece of it. That’s not always technological. It could be something of a matter of taste.” Stewart says, “The faster an entrepreneur comes to that realization and thinks about the unit economics, communicates it to investors, and realizes it in a business plan, the more likely you’ll create one of the lasting companies of the future, one of the new top technology giants of the future.”
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