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 an investor during its last funding round.
Sanabil, which manages the PIF’s private investments, recently updated the list of startups, venture capital and buyout funds it has backed, but did not disclose how much each entity received. It also revealed a stake in Chinese fast fashion giant Shein, adding to a portfolio of direct-to-consumer investments that includes education startup Classera and health tracking ring Oura.
Sanabil also backed 14 new VCs, including growth stage giants like Brad Gerstner’s Altimeter Capital Management (an investor in Grab that just raised $550 million for a new $750 million fund, according to a securities filings from July), New Enterprise Associates and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavor fund. Their relationships with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund have not previously been reported.
The fund also made investments in former Sequoia partner Neil Shen’s Hongshan Capital, wrote new checks to two China-based funds — 5Y Capital and Yunqi Partners — and backed Sweden’s Northzone. Last year Sanabil revealed investments in VC giants like Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue and Founders Fund.
New Enterprise Associates, which is one of the world’s largest VC funds and manages over $23 billion in assets, also appears on Sanabil’s list of businesses where it is a direct shareholder. NEA was reported to have sold a 15% stake in its management company to Dyal Capital Partners and Kuwait’s Wafra in 2020. It’s not known when Sanabil acquired its stake in NEA. NEA declined to comment.
Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund is best known for massive investments in SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund, its battle with the PGA golf league and its $500 billion project to build a futuristic new city, Neom. But the new disclosures reveal it has started writing checks into emerging venture investors as well as industry stalwarts, like Afore Capital, which was only founded in 2022, A* Capital, and South Park Commons, a San Francisco-based tech incubator which also writes checks into startups.
Venture capitalists rarely disclose their financial backers, known as limited partners, and many of these institutions do not reveal their investment managers unless they are public bodies like California Public Employees’ Retirement System. The PIF was ranked among the world’s least transparent sovereign wealth funds little under a decade ago by the Peterson Institute for International Economics think tank. Starting in 2022, it has begun revealing some of its investments as well as its financial performance.
Forbes reached out to the 14 venture capitalists named on the Sanabil website but none responded to a request for comment. In the past many investors and founders were cautious about disclosing ties to the kingdom over its human rights record, and the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, but some VCs have publicly embraced the kingdom more recently, including with public appearances at some of its major conferences. “Saudi has a founder. You don’t call him a founder, you call him his royal highness,” said VC Ben Horowitz of Saudi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at an event organized by the PIF in Miami, Florida, in 2023.
With close to $1 trillion in assets, PIF is core to Salman’s efforts to diversify the kingdom’s economy away from oil production, which have been underwritten by the initial public offering of state oil company Aramco.
PIF governor Yasir al-Rumayyan said in February that the fund planned to step up its spending to $70 billion a year from current levels of around $40 to $50 billion currently. That’s despite reports that Riyadh planned to dial back the scope of its mega projects with lower oil prices and national deficits, straining even the deep pockets of the kingdom.
