Cathie Wood runs a $US30 billion fund. Here's what she owns | The Business | ABC NEWS

The revenue generation started immediately and it is so much as I described with Anthropic so much higher in terms of revenues generated than we expected and you know this is all we do so this is a big surprise to us. If it's a big surprise to us it's a shock to everybody else.

Well, thank you for inviting me, Michael.

In the venture fund, we are investing actually in venture and all of our funds in five major innovation platforms. And actually that involve 15 different technologies that we think are going to transform the world. So, AI, that's the obvious one and it's the biggest catalyst to everything innovation today.

The names in AI, almost everything that we're investing in. So, we own Anthropic and OpenAI and we're direct to cap table, which means we do own the underlying equity, which you will not find in a lot of other venture funds. It's very hard to access. But because of the kind of research we do and the focused and dedicated effort in terms of researching these new technologies, I think founders respect our work and are happy to give our investors access, broader access to these new technologies. So of course in AI proper OpenAI and Anthropic but you know a name like Laya which no one's heard of, Laya, it is aiming to become basically a super intelligent scientist, a scientific platform for not only research and discovery of new therapies but also focused on material science as well. So a general scientific platform could not have been done without AI. Almost all names in all of our portfolios, we put them through an AI lens first because AI is going to be ubiquitous and the companies that harness these tools the most aggressively and creatively are going to win.

Yes. So robotics and in the venture fund one of the premier robotics companies is Figure AI for humanoid robots. In fact it did something very interesting recently. It has basically hired people to clean their own houses but wear cameras and other sensors so robots can learn from them. So that's just telling us that the big need in terms of the robotics revolution is data and data is lacking but there are lots of creative attempts to change that. Then energy storage. Energy storage is really effectively battery technology to enable solar and wind to become a part of the ecosystem supporting power, the power needs associated with AI most importantly there, that's one of the biggest shortages. And also in that realm, power, we have focused a lot on nuclear power and especially small modular reactors and micro reactors. Radiant would be a name focused on that. Then we have multiomics in the health care space. We believe that health care is the most profound application of AI. So curing disease and developing new drugs as I mentioned with Laya, diagnosing disease very early stage one, is, and in this case colorectal cancer with a blood test, soon they're, well right now they're trialing the same for pancreatic cancer which is really, it's a very nasty disease, nasty and not diagnosed typically till stage three, mostly stage four. So it definitely, it is a huge unmet need. So think about that with a blood test being able to diagnose cancer because tumors shed into the blood. So huge breakthroughs there. Curing disease is something else we're focused on. The CRISPR gene editing names that we don't have one in the private fund. It's in, we have two and more in our public funds but patents are very dear and the two in our public funds, so CRISPR Therapeutics and Intellia are in very good positions to cure, already are curing sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. So those are two rare blood disorders. But the killer app is going to be able to cure bad cholesterol. And that is hopefully in the pipeline. And then the fifth platform is blockchain technology. And there's a huge amount of infrastructure that needs to be built out as the decentralized financial world and the traditional financial world converge. So Blockdaemon is a name in our portfolios on the infrastructure side. Architect is a name focused on one of the fastest growing spaces within blockchain technology is called perpetual futures. It was invented on-chain. We have futures that expire in the public markets. These do not expire. So lots of different companies surfacing to capitalize on what we believe are going to be massive opportunities.

Now they're going to require trillions of dollars in investment. Yes.

Well, I think we were all looking for proof points and we are getting some already and they're astounding. So, in the case of Anthropic, Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate in December of last year was $9 billion. In July, it was 65 billion. You may know of Claude Code and Claude Co-work. These caused a hockey stick in terms of Anthropic's revenue. And not only that there are rumors and we think they are well founded that Anthropic's gross margins are 80%.

That's a software-like gross margin. But maybe even more important at this early stage given how much in R&D it's spending, it has been profitable two consecutive quarters on an operating basis. So I mean nobody expected that, nobody expected that. So I think what we're learning is AI is making the world a much more efficient place and creating new products and services is incredibly valuable.