Elon Musk’s generative AI startup, xAI, officially announced its long-awaited fundraise — making it the second-most-valuable generative AI company in the world behind only competitor OpenAI.
The $6 billion round included investment from Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Co., Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding Co., among others.
The new funding values the company at $24 billion post money, well behind OpenAI’s $86 billion valuation but well ahead of the $18 billion generative AI startup Anthropic is now valued at after its last raise.
It was reported earlier this month that another competitor, Paris-based Mistral AI, was closing in on a round of about $600 million from existing investors General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners that would value it at $6 billion.
Fresh cash and new AI
The xAI round had been rumored for months. The company was announced just last July and released its ChatGPT competitor, Grok, last November. It introduced its latest AI model, called Grok-1.5, just earlier this year.
Grok is trained off data from another one of Musk’s companies, X, formerly Twitter.
“xAI is primarily focused on the development of advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for all of humanity,” the company said in a blog announcing the round. “The company’s mission is to understand the true nature of the universe.”
Just last week it also was reported xAI is planning to develop a massive computer — what Musk called a “gigafactory of compute” when speaking to investors — to train its next versions of its conversational AI.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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