TLDR:
- Investors close to Elon Musk are in talks to help his artificial intelligence startup xAI raise $3 billion, valuing the company at $18 billion.
- Venture capital firm Gigafund and Steve Jurvetson are among the backers considering investing in the round.
Investors close to Elon Musk are in talks to help his artificial-intelligence startup xAI raise $3 billion in a round that would value the company at $18 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported. Venture capital firm Gigafund and Steve Jurvetson are among the backers considering investing in the round. The WSJ report also mentioned a co-founder of another venture firm as one of the potential backers. While terms of the xAI fundraising were not finalized and plans could change, current fundraising talks have gained momentum recently.
Elon Musk launched xAI last year as an alternative to Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google. In January, it was reported that xAI was in talks to raise funding at a valuation of $20 billion, but Musk denied these claims. xAI recently released an enhanced chatbot, Grok-1.5, to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The chatbot is now available to some users of X, formerly known as Twitter.
