one year on
Inflection AI raises $1.3B from Microsoft, Nvidia, Gates and Schmidt at $4B valuation
The generative AI startup behind the Pi assistant is now the second-best-funded company in the space, trailing only OpenAI.
Generative AI startup Inflection AI has closed a $1.3 billion funding round led by Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and Nvidia, the company announced today. The round values Inflection at roughly $4 billion, according to a source familiar with the matter. The company has now raised a total of $1.525 billion, making it the second-best-funded generative AI startup after OpenAI.
The company, founded by Mustafa Suleyman — a co-founder of DeepMind, now part of Google — plans to use the capital to build and deploy its first product, Pi, an AI-powered assistant designed to be a ‘kind and supportive companion.’ Inflection claims its underlying model, Inflection-1, is competitive with GPT-3.5 and PaLM-540B on reasoning and common sense benchmarks, though it lags on coding tasks.
Inflection also revealed it is working with Nvidia and CoreWeave to build what it says will be one of the largest AI training clusters in the world, comprising 22,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. The company currently has around 35 employees. The news comes as VC funding for generative AI continues to flow despite a broader downturn, with PitchBook reporting roughly $1.7 billion across 46 deals in Q1 2023.
The record
Described the investment as supporting work on Pi, calling personal AI 'the most transformational tool of our lifetimes' and calling this 'an inflection point'.
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
Within nine months, Microsoft would hire Inflection's founders and most of its staff, effectively gutting the company. The $1.3B round became a cautionary tale about talent acquisition masking as investment.