Serial entrepreneur Venkat Srinivasan. (Photo: The Mishra Group)

Serial entrepreneur Venkat Srinivasan announced, Oct. 19, the launch a new venture capital firm, Innospark Ventures, which will provide $100 million for artificial intelligence-driven startups and ventures, primarily in early-stage companies in life sciences, business services, education and cybersecurity.

“The current wave of AI is still in its early innings, and we are likely to see new architectures emerge for AI which will address the challenges of transparency, context, causality and noisy data,” said Srinivasan. “The Innospark team believes this creates enormous opportunities for startups to play a role in shaping the ecosystem of tomorrow.”

The fund hopes to provide capital and support at all stages of the innovation and entrepreneurship lifecycle.

Srinivasan, who is the founder and will serve as managing director of the Boston-based Innospark, has been a successful entrepreneur for most of his career. He brings deep expertise in AI and computational algorithms, especially computational linguistics, combined with deep functional knowledge in multiple domains, including finance and accounting.

He has founded several successful AI-led startups, including eCredit, which he sold to the Internet Capital Group. Most recently, he sold enterprise artificial intelligence platform RAGE Frameworks to Genpact Limited.

Although a large number of companies are exploring AI technology, there are not many companies that currently apply AI successfully in production.

“We are thrilled by the opportunity to create a friendly and open local community for entrepreneurs navigating through the challenges of applying AI successfully,” said Sophie Meralli of the Innospark team.

Prior to joining Innospark, Meralli worked in the financial advisory practice of E&Y, where she specialized in IPO and M&A transactions for technology companies in Paris and Tokyo. She recently received an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she focused on AI and machine learning, and served as an advisor for several AI-driven startups.

Bringing deep AI expertise and decades of entrepreneurial experience, Innospark’s founding team appreciates the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence on the future of our society. The team created Innospark with the goal of nurturing early and growth stage AI-led entrepreneurs around Boston, Cambridge and New England and creating funding bridges for underserved industries.

Innospark is a family office fund which allows it to take a patient and proactive approach to investing. The principals invest their own money and are fully aligned with each and every entrepreneur the fund invests in. They believe that high-impact innovation can take several years, and their capital has no fixed time horizon.