From established global giants and hyperscalers to nimble startups, accelerators and incubators, artificial intelligence innovation is flowing in from multiple channels.

It’s imperative to give nascent AI innovators the needed support and collaboration to scale operational hurdles and concretize ideas. That’s the ethos behind IBM Corp.’s strategy.

Discussing IBM’s AI fund and its support for startups such as Unstructured.

“We launched the AI fund to invest in a range of companies from early to growth-stage startups,” said Emily Fontaine (pictured, right), Office of the Chairman and CEO at IBM Corp. “Our goal here is to accelerate innovation at the infrastructure and enterprise application layers. We’re investing in companies that have cutting-edge solutions and that are bringing a more robust, comprehensive set of capabilities to our clients.”

Fontaine and Dave Donahue (left), head of strategy at Unstructured Technologies Inc., spoke with theCUBE Research’s Dave Vellante at IBM Think, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the dynamics of AI investment, innovation and strategic partnerships at IBM. (* Disclosure below.)

The genesis of Unstructured and its AI fit

IBM’s Enterprise AI Venture Fund allows the integration of cutting-edge technologies into its ecosystem, thereby enhancing the capabilities offered to clients. Unstructured offers one such critical capability, allowing the enterprise-scale processing of unstructured data.

“IBM included, there’s probably 250 of the Fortune 500 companies using us,” Donahue said. “A lot of those are production-like workloads. So, several types of ongoing usage case, which suggests to us that there’s a good path forward for Unstructured and AI stuff moving forward.”

The company was born out of frustration with the time-consuming, bespoke solutions traditionally required to manage unstructured data. Its platform, which transforms any file type into a normalized JSON or document file, has seen significant adoption with 9 million downloads globally. This adoption has validated the company’s product-market fit and positioned it as a crucial player in the AI landscape, Donahue explained.

“All of our clients come to us and they have massive amounts of data, and they need to be able to ingest that and figure out how best to deliver insights on that and make actuals and sort through that data,” he said. “Unstructured really is an opportunity for them to be able to do that in a meaningful way.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of IBM Think: 

(* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE