American Banker, citing Citi Ventures, reported that the investment shows banks are embracing and implementing AI. According to the report, the investment provides more insight into how Citigroup is using AI across the company. The software is popular with younger generations, which is an important group to attract.
“We’ve been working to build out the technology stack at Citi so that we can drive broad adoption of machine learning within various use cases and functions,” said Ramneek Gupta, managing director and co-head of venture investing at Citi Ventures. Meanwhile, Gupta noted that Anaconda is popular among students, which is what piqued his interest in the company to begin with. “When [those students] move into the workforce, they will want the same environment, and that drives demand for the platform.”
So what other reasons drove Citi Ventures to Anaconda? According to the report, every big bank in the U.S. uses it: HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and now Citi have gone public with it, as well as USAA on the insurance side and BMW, Jeep and Samsung in manufacturing. The company has 135 employees and $45 million in capital, and counts General Catalyst as an original investor. Both companies declined to say how much Citi Ventures invested in Anaconda other than it was “significant.”
“In any given month, we have six million users — that represents most modern data scientists worldwide,” Anaconda CEO Scott Collison said in the report. “As data science shifts from more traditional platforms to a couple of languages, primarily Python and R, we support both those modern languages, so most universities use our platform to teach on and most companies are moving in this direction.”
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