Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, has raised $6 billion in a brand new funding round, it said today, in one among the biggest deals within the red-hot nascent space, as he shores up capital to aggressively compete with rivals including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.
Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding are among the many backers who’ve invested in xAI’s Series B funding, the startup wrote in a blog post.
The funding confirms TechCrunch‘s reporting from April that xAI was seeking to raise $6 billion. xAI on the time was finalizing the round that might have given it a valuation of $18 billion, TechCrunch reported on the time. xAI, which began just last 12 months and has spun out of social network X, didn’t disclose the way it was valued in the brand new round and whether X had also invested.
Musk is one among the earliest and high-profile entrepreneurs within the AI space. Tesla, a automotive company he leads, is the highest EV carmaker with self-driving technologies. He can also be an early investor in OpenAI, a startup through which he has invested tens of tens of millions of dollars. Musk’s love for OpenAI has waned since: In March, he sued OpenAI and its co-founder Sam Altman for allegedly betraying its mission statement and becoming a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft.
After forming xAI 12 months, Musk released its chatbot ChatGPT-rival Grok 1.0 model in November. Later, the corporate made the model available through a chatbot to Premium+ users — who pay $16 a month — on X. In April, the corporate released the brand new Grok 1.5 model and in addition allowed Premium users on X to access the chatbot.
xAI plans to deploy the funds from the brand new financing round to take its first set of products to market, construct advanced infrastructure, and speed up the research and development of future technologies, it said within the blog post.
