Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, has successfully raised $6 billion in a Series B funding round. This significant investment, backed by renowned venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, marks one of the largest deals in the rapidly growing field of AI development.
xAI, which originated from the social network formerly known as Twitter, is closely tied to X.com. The company made its debut less than a year ago with the launch of the Grok AI service. Since then, xAI has been at the forefront of developing advanced AI tools.
The recent funding round, announced on May 26, has set the company’s pre-money valuation at $18 billion. The funds raised will be used to bring xAI’s first set of products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies.
xAI’s Grok 1.0 model, a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, was released in November last year. The company later made the model available through a chatbot to Premium+ users on X. In April, xAI released the new Grok 1.5 model and expanded access to Premium users on X.
xAI has faced criticism for the accuracy of Grok’s news summary feature on X, which has been reported to generate misleading information. However, the company maintains its commitment to developing “truthful” AI systems and plans to use the new funding to address these issues and expand its offerings beyond X.
Read more: Bloomberg