Elon Musk’s xAI raises 6 billion dollars in the latest round of funding from Valor, Sequoia, and a16z to continue its growth in the AI industry.
xAI, an AI startup led by Elon Musk, has secured a $6 billion funding round, the company announced today. This is one of the most substantial transactions in the rapidly developing industry, and Musk is bolstering capital to compete aggressively with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google, among others.
The Series B funding for xAI has been contributed to by Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, and Kingdom Holding, according to a blog post by the startup.
The funding substantiates the April TechCrunch report that xAI intended to raise $6 billion. TechCrunch said xAI was concluding the funding round that would have valued the company at $18 billion. xAI, a social network spin-off that debuted just one year ago, did not reveal its valuation in the new round of funding or whether X had also invested.
Elon Musk is among the pioneering and well-known entrepreneurs in artificial intelligence. He oversees Tesla, the leading electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer with autonomous driving technologies. Furthermore, he has invested tens of millions of dollars in OpenAI, a venture in which he was an early investor. Since March, when he filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its co-founder Sam Altman for allegedly breaching the organization’s mission statement and becoming a “closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft, Musk’s affection for OpenAI has diminished.
Following the establishment of xAI year, Musk introduced Grok 1.0, a chatbot adversary to ChatGPT, in November. Later, the company made the model accessible via chatbot to $16-per-month Premium+ users on X. The company introduced Grok 1.5 and granted Premium users access to the chatbot on X in April.
The blog post stated that xAI intends to use the funds from the new financing round to establish advanced infrastructure, expedite the research and development of future technologies, and bring its first line of products to market.
