The Billion-Dollar AI Club

The kind of cash flooding into AI startups in the US is downright jaw-dropping! Recently, Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence Inc (SSI) secured a whopping $1 billion in funding from NFDG, a16z, Sequoia, DST Global, and SV Angel, led by Nat Friedman and SSI chief Daniel Gross—an insane feat for a three-month-old venture. The newly-minted company has plans to scale computing power and build a highly trusted team of researchers and engineers focused on safe AGI, split between Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel. 

In May this year, Elon Musk’s xAI raised $6 billion in Series B funding from Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, a16z, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, and Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud at a valuation of $24 billion, making it the second most-valuable generative AI company in the world after OpenAI.