Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI has raised $6 billion in a new funding round, it announced today, in one of the largest deals in this nascent field, as it builds capital to aggressively compete with rivals including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.
Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding are among the backers that invested in xAI’s Series B funding, the startup wrote in a blog post.
The funding confirms TechCrunch’s April report that xAI was looking to raise $6 billion. xAI was at the time finalizing the round that would have given it a valuation of $18 billion, TechCrunch reported at the time. xAI, which started last year and grew out of social network X, did not reveal how it was valued in the new round or whether X had also invested.
Musk is one of the oldest and most prominent entrepreneurs in the field of AI. Tesla, the automaker he leads, is the first electric vehicle automaker with autonomous driving technologies. He is also an early investor in OpenAI, a startup in which he has invested tens of millions of dollars. Musk’s love of OpenAI has since waned: In March, he sued OpenAI and its co-founder Sam Altman for allegedly betraying its mission statement and becoming a “de facto closed-source subsidiary” of Microsoft.
After creating xAI last year, Musk released his ChatGPT chatbot model, Grok 1.0, in November. The company later made the model available via a 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 access the chatbot.
xAI plans to deploy funds from the new funding round to commercialize its first set of products, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate research and development of future technologies, it said in the blog post.
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