Generative AI space continues to be a hot investment area, with Inflection AI, a startup with a vision to create "personal AI for everyone," securing a massive $1.3 billion funding round. High-profile investors such as Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and new investor Nvidia led the investment. As Forbes first reported, this round brings Inflection AI's total funding to $1.525 billion, positioning the company at a valuation of $4 billion.
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Inflection and co-founder of Google's AI lab DeepMind, revealed that the new capital injection would help the company develop its inaugural product, an AI-powered assistant named Pi.
"Personal AI is poised to be the most transformative tool of our era. This is truly an inflection point," Suleyman said. "We're thrilled to work with Nvidia, Microsoft, and CoreWeave, along with Eric, Bill, and many others to actualize this vision."
Operating from Palo Alto, California, Inflection AI has a compact team of around 35 members and has maintained a low profile, granting few media interviews. The company launched Pi in May, an AI designed to offer knowledge based on individual interests and needs. The platform aims to serve as a "kind" and "supportive" companion, providing "friendly" advice and information in a "natural, flowing" style.
Inflection recently showcased Inflection-1, the AI model driving Pi. According to the company, it performs competitively against other models in its tier, such as OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and Google's PaLM-540B. However, in areas like coding, GPT-3.5 and OpenAI's GPT-4 surpass Inflection-1.
Inflection announced its collaboration with Nvidia and CoreWeave, a GPU cloud provider, to construct one of the world's largest AI training clusters, composed of 22,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.
Despite the challenging macroeconomic environment, generative AI startups are drawing significant investments. In fact, PitchBook data reveals that approximately $1.7 billion was invested across 46 deals in Q1 2023, with an additional $10.68 billion worth of deals announced but not yet completed.
