Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence raises $2B at $32B valuation—with no product yet
OpenAI’s co-founder secures massive backing for his new AGI lab from Alphabet, Nvidia, and top VCs.
In one of the boldest bets yet in the AI arms race, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the stealth startup founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has raised $2 billion in a round that values the company at $32 billion—despite having no publicly released product or service.
Safe Superintelligence is valued at $32B and doesn’t want you to know it exists
The round was led by Greenoaks, which reportedly invested $500 million, and also included Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and DST Global, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. Alphabet and Nvidia have also backed the company, and Google Cloud has become a major infrastructure provider to the AI lab.
The raise underscores an extraordinary level of investor confidence in Sutskever and his co-founders, Daniel Gross, Apple’s former AI lead, and Daniel Levy, a respected AI researcher. The group launched SSI in June 2024, shortly after Sutskever left OpenAI amid a failed internal coup against CEO Sam Altman. The company’s stated mission is to build a superintelligent AI system that is safe and aligned with human values—a vision that subtly critiques OpenAI’s current trajectory.
SSI is developing its models on Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) instead of Nvidia’s widely-used GPUs, a rare move in the AI space. According to sources, the startup is Google Cloud’s most significant external TPU customer since it began offering the chips commercially. Nvidia is also an investor, making SSI one of the few companies drawing support from both chip giants. SSI has yet to release any AI models or technical demonstrations.
The company’s presence in Tel Aviv is also growing. It recently leased space in a high-rise in Midtown and hired Dr. Yair Carmon, a machine learning expert at Tel Aviv University, as one of its first local engineers. With around 20 employees globally, SSI remains extremely lean for a startup of its valuation.
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That valuation has surged sixfold in less than a year. SSI’s first funding round last September saw it raise $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation—already a staggering figure for a pre-product startup. The latest $2 billion haul suggests investors are not only betting on Sutskever’s past track record—he was instrumental in OpenAI’s breakthroughs with GPT—but also on the possibility that SSI will be the next foundational model company to challenge OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.
The aggressive capital infusion mirrors broader dynamics in the AI ecosystem. Tech giants are increasingly investing not just in infrastructure, but directly in the companies that will depend on it. Alphabet’s cloud arm has committed TPU resources to both Anthropic and SSI, while Amazon is backing Anthropic through its own custom chips, Trainium and Inferentia. Microsoft remains deeply intertwined with OpenAI.
SSI’s rise also reflects a continuing trend: in the current AI landscape, visionary leadership and strategic infrastructure access may outweigh actual product delivery, at least in the early stages.
Reuters contributed to this report.
