Blackstone, H&F and Anthropic form Ode to deploy AI at portfolio companies

Ode deploys AI engineers across Blackstone and H&F portfolio companies

Ode, the joint venture between Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Anthropic, will place AI engineers inside portfolio companies — beginning with those owned by its private-equity backers before expanding to outside firms — The Wall Street Journal reported. The roughly 160-person team is built around experienced engineers rather than junior AI specialists, said Rodney Zemmel, global head of Blackstone’s operating team. “What we liked was this was a senior engineering team,” Zemmel told the Journal. “It’s not like a bunch of kids who just learned AI.”

The three principals are each committing about $300 million to the $1.5 billion venture, with Apollo, General Atlantic and Goldman Sachs among the additional backers, the Journal reported. Ode is structured as a stand-alone firm.

Ode in May acquired Fractional AI, an AI-services startup where most of the venture’s engineers previously worked; Chamberlain had already been a Fractional AI client since late last year. Chris Taylor, chief executive of Ode, said the customer pipeline is “immense and growing by the day.”

At Blackstone, deployment is beginning with a small group of portfolio businesses. Engineers are already embedded at six of the firm’s companies, and Blackstone plans to expand the work to 25 of its more than 270 portfolio companies overall. An executive on Blackstone’s applied-AI team spends one to two days a week on-site at the businesses, Zemmel said. Private-equity executives said Ode will help portfolio companies build new product lines to drive up revenue, and that cost savings are not the primary focus of the work.

The Chamberlain Group offers a snapshot of how the model operates. Blackstone acquired the Oak Brook, Ill.-based maker of LiftMaster garage-door openers in 2021 at a $5 billion valuation. Eighteen engineers at Chamberlain’s headquarters work in six three-person pods, with Ode AI experts among them. The team is helping the company expand optional software features — including notifications when packages are delivered or garbage is picked up, recognition of designated people, and alerts to homeowners.

Chamberlain is on track to add more than 3 million video cameras to homeowners’ properties this year, compared with about 1.7 million last year. The cameras are needed to run advanced AI features. Ode engineers are now helping Chamberlain test software that can learn a family’s routines — such as when household members arrive home — and flag deviations to the homeowner.

The company expects its digital-doorman business to generate $500 million in annual revenue by 2030, compared with the $100 million planned for this year and $40 million last year, Chamberlain Chief Executive Jeff Meredith told the Journal. Before the Ode venture, Chamberlain had estimated that line of business would top out at about $160 million. Chamberlain overall is on pace to book more than $2 billion in revenue this year, Meredith said.

Chamberlain also expects more cost efficiencies from ramping up its use of Anthropic’s Claude. The advertising campaign for its new smart-access products around Amazon’s Prime Day in June was 10 times cheaper than a year earlier, in part because of AI tools, Zemmel said.

The deployment extends to professional services. At Citrin Cooperman, a Blackstone-backed accounting and advisory firm, Ode engineers are building a portal designed to let accountants and financial advisers collaborate more effectively with clients.

Hellman & Friedman began its Ode rollout with Baker Tilly, one of its 30 portfolio companies. Ode engineers sit with the firm’s audit leaders to map the daily workflows of financial and tax accountants and identify where AI agents could be deployed, supplementing Baker Tilly’s small internal software engineering staff.

Portfolio companies pay for Ode’s services through commercial consulting or service agreements, and their private-equity backers cannot dictate whether they use the venture. “It’s up to the private equity-backed companies to decide whether to use Ode — based on the cost and best fit for the project,” Zemmel said.

The Ode launch has a direct competitor. OpenAI has formed a rival consulting venture that would offer AI deployment services to companies, backed by a $4 billion investment led by private-equity firm TPG.

The venture’s formation comes as business leaders have been reviewing their AI spending and questioning whether the costs are worthwhile, according to the Journal. White-collar anxiety over AI has surged, but executives have dialed back warnings of mass layoffs: 20% of CEOs in a May survey from EY-Parthenon said they believed AI investments would spur significant job cuts, down from 46% in January 2025.