xAI, a company founded by Elon Musk that builds artificial intelligence to accelerate human scientific discovery, announced it has raised $6 billion at a valuation of $24 billion. The Series B funding included participation from Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and, Kingdom Holding, and others.
“xAI has made significant strides over the past year. From the announcement of the company in July 2023 to the release of Grok-1 on X in November, to the recent announcements of the improved Grok-1.5 model with long context capability, to Grok-1.5V with image understanding, xAI’s model capabilities have improved rapidly. With the open-source release of Grok-1, xAI has opened doors for advancements in various applications, optimizations, and extensions of the model,” said the company in a blog post.
Prior to raising this funding round, the company was valued at about $18 billion. In the coming months, the company will be revealing technology updates and products. And the funds will be used for taking xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies.
Along with being the founder of xAI, Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI. Musk stepped down as chairman from OpenAI due to disagreements associated with the company’s direction. Musk publicly criticized OpenAI raising substantial amounts of funding from Microsoft.
xAI currently offers an AI-based chatbot called Grok for paying users of X (formerly known as Twitter).
