one year on
Ilya Sutskever's startup Safe Superintelligence raises $1B at $5B valuation
Safe Superintelligence raises over $1 billion from investors including NFDG, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global and SV Angel, valuing the company at $5 billion, according to Reuters.
Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised over $1 billion in capital from investors including NFDG (an investment partnership run by Nat Friedman and SSI CEO Daniel Gross), Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global and SV Angel. The round values the company at $5 billion, Reuters reports, citing a source familiar with the deal.
SSI told Reuters it plans to use the funding to acquire computing power and hire researchers and engineers, with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. What exactly it will research remains undisclosed.
Prior to founding SSI, Sutskever led the now-dismantled Superalignment team at OpenAI, which focused on general AI safety research. He quietly departed OpenAI months after a highly publicized fallout with CEO Sam Altman over what Sutskever has described as a breakdown in communications.
The record
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
SSI would later disclose a partnership with Nvidia and a compute cluster, but never released a product or public benchmark. The bet on 'fund the researcher' became a template copied by other high-profile AI departures, though none matched SSI's valuation-to-employee ratio.