OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever has raised $2bn for his artificial intelligence start-up in a deal which values the year-old company at $32bn though it currently has no product. Sutskever, who left OpenAI last year after a failed coup against chief executive Sam Altman, launched Safe Superintelligence last June with Daniel Gross, who led Apple’s AI efforts, and Daniel Levy, an AI researcher. The funding round underscores investors’ keen appetite for bankrolling AI start-ups led by prominent researchers or talented engineers. That appetite shows little sign of diminishing, even against the backdrop of economic tumult in the US. Prominent venture capital firms participated in the latest fundraising, including Greenoaks — which led the round with $500mn — as well as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, said multiple people familiar with the matter. SSI last raised $1bn at a $5bn valuation in September. SSI has set out to create AI models that are dramatically more powerful and more intelligent than current cutting-edge models from rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. It has offices in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel. The company has given few details about how it intends to beat those better-funded rivals, but Sutskever told the Financial Times last year that he and the team had “identified a new mountain to climb that’s a bit different from what I was working on previously”.

Full story : Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence raised $2 billion led by Greenoaks at a $32 billion valuation; SSI last raised $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation in September 2024.