Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, said today it has raised $6 billion in a new funding round, one of the biggest deals in the emerging sector, as it seeks capital to compete aggressively with rivals including OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.
Valor Equity Partners, V Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and Kingdom Holding are among the investors that have invested in xAI’s Series B funding. wrote In a blog post.
This funding confirms TechCrunchxAI was planning to raise $6 billion, according to reports in April. At the time, xAI was finalizing a round that would have given it a valuation of $18 billion, TechCrunch reported at the time. xAI, which started last year and is a spin-off from social network X, has also invested in X.
Musk confirmed that this investment round was valued at $18 billion pre-money.
Musk is one of the earliest and most high-profile entrepreneurs in the AI field. Tesla, a car company he leads, is the top EV carmaker with self-driving technologies. He is also the co-founder of OpenAI, a startup he has invested in millions of dollars. Musk’s love for OpenAI has waned since then: In March, he OpenAI and its co-founder Sam Altman sued allegedly for betraying its mission statement and becoming a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft. He also accused Google of Codon Partiality in its AI products.
After the formation of xAI year, Musk released his chatbot ChatGPT-rival Grok 1.0 model in November. Later, the company made the model available via chatbot to Premium+ users – who pay $16 per month on X. In April, the company released the new Grok 1.5 model and also allowed Premium users on X can access the chatbotAdditionally, the Musk-owned company has also announced a deal for Grok Multimodal capabilities in AprilEarlier this year, the company Grok model open-sourced But without any training code.
XAI said it will use the funds from the new financing round to bring its first set of products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate research and development of future technologies. blog postThe company is looking for partnerships to expand Grok to users beyond X.
The company claims that it aims to develop “truthful” AI systems. However, Grok’s news summary feature on X informed of Creating confusion and producing misleading information.
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