Bill Tai the AI guy is betting money on the technology’s infrastructure

Kite-surfing Silicon Valley investor Bill Tai, who made millions of dollars backing SafetyCulture and Canva, sees a healthy future in companies which build AI infrastructure.

US investor Bill Tai initially chose to stay here due to his love of our beaches.

For silicon Valley investor Bill Tai, who has made millions of dollars on the back of early-stage investments in Canva and SafetyCulture, running a start-up is a lot like kite surfing.

“Often you’re by yourself, it’s windy and the ocean is very big so you’ve got to figure out what to do,” he told a crowd at the WestTech Fest in Perth this week.

Kite surfing was in fact what brought Mr Tai to Perth in the first place, lured by an offer from his friend, Larry Lopez.

“Larry had basically started a little conference and wanted a venture capital speaker and so he said to me, ‘Hey, you know, if you come out, I think I got budget. You can kite up and down the coast for a week’,” he recalled.

“When I got off the plane and saw the beaches, I thought California must have been like this 40 or 50 years ago but instead of brown sand, it’s white.”

Mr Tai kept coming back with friends and eventually started what was called the Western Australia App Awards. At first they were concerned nobody would enter but in the first round there were 120 entrants.

In business as in pleasure Bill Tai feels the conditions and adjusts accordingly.

“Sure enough, Melanie Perkins entered, and she didn’t place in the top 20 for some reason, but but we took a liking to her,” he said. The next year she was a finalist.

Ms Perkins, a co-founder at one Australia’s most successful start-ups, Canva, applied every single year to that competition – and she did the same each time she saw Mr Tai when it came to seeking funding, he said.

Eventually he did invest, just as he did in other Australian start-ups SafetyCulture, Liven and PowerLedger of which his initial investment is now worth a multimillion-dollar sum.

Mr Tai was also an investor in Blackbird Ventures and start-ups Shoes of Prey, posse.com and Bubblegum Interactive.

Mr Tai’s predictions for 2024 aren’t all that different to what he told this masthead this time last year. He’s still betting big on video and since opened a company called Gigaverse in which he is an investor and is also on the board.

Bill Tai has invested in a video company in which sport can be watched with input from ‘influencers’.

The company is banking not only on the fact that video will grow but it creates a new kind of content and fan base in which users watch their favourite sport with live commentary from influencers.

He’s gung ho about AI and said he was fortunate enough to not have to tell the Australian companies he’d backed to jump on that bandwagon.

“Months ago Canva partnered with OpenAI to introduce something called CanvaGPT and that allows any designer to input something into the Canva’s GPT and leverage the knowledge base of every other user that’s ever designed something on the platform,” he said.

For those who want to cash in on the trend, he signalled that infrastructure might be the place to do so.

“The technologies needed to power AI are very capital intensive to develop,” he said.

“The wave has crept up a lot faster than people thought it could and because there are significant companies that have significant data assets rushing into the game, the rate of advancement is going to be so high that if people don’t start now, the knowledge gap may be too wide for them to catch up.”

Joseph was a guest of WestTech Fest in Perth.