Elon Musk's xAI valued at $24 Bln Following Fresh funding
The AI firm has raised another $6 billion from investors, including Silicon Valley venture capitalists and a Saudi prince, boosting its valuation to $24 billion.
Elon Musk's AI startup xAI raised $6 billion in Series B funding, reaching a post-money valuation of $24 billion.
Investors backing the round of funding included Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, and Kingdom Holding, among others. The company has announced in a blog post on Sunday.
Musk said in a post on X, that more will be announced in the coming weeks.
There will be more to announce in the coming weeks
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 27, 2024
xAI said in its post that the new money would be used to take the firm’s “first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies.”
The funding sets the company up as a potential rival to OpenAI, the AI research group behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT. Musk is a co-founder of OpenAI, but stepped down as chairman six years ago over disagreements about the company’s direction.
In March, Musk took legal action against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, accusing them of violating their contractual obligations and straying from the startup's original goal of developing artificial intelligence (AI) for the betterment of humanity.
This lawsuit marks the culmination of longstanding tensions between Musk and his new company on the one hand and Altman and OpenAI, which secured a $13 billion investment from Microsoft. Musk claimed to have donated $44 million to the organization, believing it would remain a non-profit entity.
However, disagreements with Altman over research direction led Musk to resign from OpenAI's board in 2018, preceding the establishment of a for-profit arm in which Microsoft invested.
Last April, Musk's xAI raised $3 billion in funding. This investment round left the value of the company at $18 billion.
In November, xAI announced that it was developing an AI-powered chatbot called “Grok” for some paying users of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk also owns. The billionaire said in a post on X at the time that Grok was being trained by having “real-time access” to information on the site.