Elon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company raised $6 billion from earnest investors the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and even a Saudi prince.
OpenAI competitor who developed its own Grok chatbotannounced a Series B funding round on Sunday, pushing the company to A Valued at $24 billion. Previously it was expected to reach approx Valued at $18 billion after the current round is closed.
XAI, announced last July, joins other artificial intelligence companies raising millions and watching them valuations run into the billions amid a boom in the industry. It includes AI talent from DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, as well as other huge language model (LLM) and machine learning researchers.
Company listed Investor from Saudi Arabia Prince Alwaleed bin Talal as one of the supporters of Series B, as Saudi Arabia is reported to be working with American financiers, including Andreessen Horowitz, to will invest $40 billion in artificial intelligence technology.
According to xAI, other key investors in the multi-billion round include Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company and Kingdom Holding. According to Crunchbase, Manhattan Venture Partners is also an investor.
In March, Musk said xAI would do just that open source for its ChatGPT rival, GrokAfter is suing his former company OpenAI a month earlier. Musk co-founded OpenAI with CEO Sam Altman, whom he is also suing in 2015, before leaving in 2018 over disagreements with management. In his lawsuit, Musk alleged OpenAI’s multi-year, multi-billion partnership with Microsoft betrays its founding commitment to put the benefit of humanity before profit.
The lawsuit alleges breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and unfair business practices. Musk asked for an order to order the company to make its research and technology publicly available and demanded that Altman give up the money derived from the alleged illegal practices.
