Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman commit $1.5B to Anthropic for Ode, a 160-person AI team focused on revenue growth. TPG invests $4B in OpenAI's rival consulting venture.
Private equity firms are placing artificial intelligence experts inside their portfolio companies, a move that aims to grow revenue rather than cut costs, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman have formed a $1.5 billion joint venture with Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude. The stand-alone entity, called Ode, will serve both private-equity-backed and outside companies. Each of the three partners has pledged about $300 million to the effort.
Blackstone plans to bring Ode's engineers to 25 of its more than 270 portfolio companies. Six already have teams working on site.
“What we liked was this was a senior engineering team,” said Rodney Zemmel, who heads Blackstone’s operating team. “It’s not like a bunch of kids who just learned AI.”
One of the early portfolio companies is Chamberlain Group, a maker of garage-door openers that Blackstone bought in 2021. Ode's engineers are helping expand software features, such as alerts that tell homeowners when packages arrive.
Ode's customer pipeline, including companies that are not private-equity-backed, is “immense and growing by the day,” said Chris Taylor, the group's chief executive.
The venture is part of a broader push by Wall Street to embed AI into business operations. OpenAI has launched a rival consulting service, backed by a $4 billion investment led by TPG, the private-equity firm.
Private-equity executives said Ode's focus is on establishing new product lines, not cost savings. The approach contrasts with the anxiety many companies have expressed about AI displacing workers. White-collar concern about the technology has risen. Some executives have walked back predictions of sweeping job cuts.
The joint venture is structured as a stand-alone company, giving it the flexibility to work with clients outside the private-equity orbit. Ode's engineers are already embedded at six companies, and Blackstone expects that number to grow to 25. The joint venture's customer pipeline outside the private-equity world is also building, Taylor said.
For TPG, the OpenAI investment adds another layer of AI exposure. The firm carries an Alpha Score of 53 on AlphaScala's scale, reflecting a mixed label in the Financial Services sector.
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