Inflection AI raises $1.3 billion from Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates and Nvidia

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Inflection AI. Credit: Twitter/@mustafasuleymn

By Rachel Metz

Inflection AI, a startup that makes a “kind and supportive” chatbot called Pi, has raised $1.3 billion in one of the largest funding rounds of Silicon Valley’s current artificial intelligence frenzy.

The deal values the less-than-two-year-old startup at $4 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private information.

Inflection AI’s co-founders include high-profile Silicon Valley figures: Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Parters, and Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of Google’s influential artificial intelligence lab, DeepMind.

The company also has a star-studded list of investors. Its new funding round was led by Hoffman, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt and Nvidia Corp. Nvidia’s stock has soared about 180 per cent this year, thanks in part to demand for its chips to power AI.

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Even in an era of investor obsession with AI startups, Inflection AI’s deal is remarkable in its scale. The funding round brings the total raised by the company to $1.53 billion, Inflection AI said Thursday. It did not disclose how much of the deal is cash, and how much is other forms of value, such as credits for technologies that power AI tools.

The company said it’s working with CoreWeave and Nvidia to build what it called the world’s largest AI computing cluster, with 22,000 of Nvidia’s H100 chips, which are intended for use with large language models in particular.

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“Personal AI is going to be the most transformational tool of our lifetimes,” Suleyman said in a statement. “This is truly an inflection point.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also enthused that the startup is using Nvidia technology to “deploy massive generative AI models that enable amazing personal digital assistants.”

The company’s chatbot Pi, which is an abbreviation of “personal intelligence,” is designed to be an assistant offering “text and voice conversations, friendly advice, and concise information in a natural, flowing style.”