Inflection AI, a startup backed by several prominent Silicon Valley companies, announced on Thursday that it raised $1.3 billion from investors, including Microsoft and Nvidia, amid a boom in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector.
According to a source familiar with the matter who spoke to Reuters, the investment—a combination of cash and cloud credit—valued the one-year-old company at $4 billion.
Last month, Inflection launched its chatbot Pi. It was founded by Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of Google DeepMind, and Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, focusing on building consumer-faced AI products. It is considered the top rival of OpenAI.
Like ChatGPT, Pi interacts with users through dialogues that let users ask questions and provide feedback. A personal AI that helps in planning, scheduling, information gathering, and other duties is what Inflection said it aims to build.
Palo Alto, California-based Inflection AI has about 35 employees. It raised $225 million in a first round of funding in early 2022 from Greylock, Microsoft and Reid Hoffman.
It claims in a report released last week that its model Inflection-1, which powers Pi, outperformed most models on the market.
Suleyman, CEO of Inflection, stated that most of the funding would improve computational capacity to build a more powerful foundation model.
“We’ll be building a cluster of around 22,000 H100s. This is approximately three times more compute than what was used to train all of GPT4. Speed and scale are what’s going to really enable us to build a differentiated product,” Suleyman said at Collision Conference on Thursday.
After OpenAI’s bot, ChatGPT, became popular late last year, the AI space has been regarded as the next technological frontier.
The sector has drawn several investors in recent months as companies look for ways to incorporate the technology into their operations and regulators look at how to deal with it.
Microsoft, an existing investor and backer of the rival OpenAI, participated in Inflection’s latest fundraise.
Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and Nvidia—which has recently increased its AI investments—were also present in the most recent round, according to Inflection.
