Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup has secured a massive Series B funding round.
The company, xAI, says it has secured $6 billion in a new funding round that values it at $24 billion. Investors in the round include Fidelity, Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, among others.
A $6 billion funding round is an astonishingly large number for a company that launched less than a year ago, and underlines investors' desire to secure a slice of AI companies. It's also a bet on Musk, who continues to serve as CEO or top executive at companies like Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), The Boring Company and Neuralink.
In the case of xAI, the first major product is a large language model called Grok, which is accessible to premium users of .
“xAI is primarily focused on developing advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial to all humanity,” the company said in a statement announcing the Series B round. “The company's mission is to understand the true nature of the universe.”
Musk is, of course, one of the richest people in the world and has launched or acquired a number of companies that influence much of the US economy (for example, SpaceX is one of the fastest growing internet providers in the world through its Starlink service).
His efforts at X were slightly less successful, after he acquired the social platform for $44 billion two years ago. The company's value has been written down several times by Fidelity, along with Musk, since the acquisition some advertisers through comments he has made at public events.
Now xAI is at the heart of the company's turnaround plan, with Grok embedded in the premium version of the platform. It's not immediately clear whether xAI will try to make the model more widely available.