Ilya Sutskever's SSI raising money at $20b valuation - report

The secretive AI company was reportedly founded in June 2024 and has said that it plans to operate from offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), AI startup founded last year by OpenAI founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, is in talks to raise money at a company valuation of at least $20 billion, "Reuters" reports, according to four sources.

This is four times the valuation of the financing round completed last September, when the company raised about $1 billion from a prominent investor consortium that included Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, SV Angel and NFDG, at a valuation of $5 billion.

According to the Reuters report, the company's talks with existing and new investors are still in the early stages and the terms may change. In addition, it is not yet clear what amount Sutzkever's company is targeting in the current funding round.

SSI did not respond to the "Reuters" report.

To date, the company has been operating in stealth and playing its cards very close to its chest. The company was reportedly founded in June 2024 and has said that it plans to operate from offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. Sutzkever's cofounders are Daniel Gross, a former Israeli who previously led AI initiatives at Apple, as well as Daniel Levy, who previously worked as a researcher at OpenAI.

The company's Tel Aviv operations are represented by Adv. Amir Raz, who registered the company in Israel.

"New research direction

Beyond saying that it is developing safe AI technology, little is known about the secretive startup's activities. At the NeurIPS conference, the world's leading conference on machine learning, held last December, Sutzkever criticized the current approach in the field, in which improving AI models relies mainly on increasing the amount of data and the model's hardware. "We have reached peak data and there will be no more. We have to make do with the data we have. There is only one Internet," Sutzkever said, hinting that his company is developing a new approach that does not depend on the infinite expansion of databases. The 38-year-old scientist also defined the new research direction as "a new mountain to climb," but declined to reveal further details.

According to sources familiar with the details of the fundraising last September, the company, which has not yet generated revenue, has made it clear to investors not to expect profits in the short term. In a presentation to potential investors, SSI stressed plans to "quietly expand" while separating progress from commercial pressures.

The current round will be a test for the entire industry, after Chinese venture DeepSeek shook the markets two weeks ago, presenting an advanced model supposedly based on very low investment. Despite this, capital raising in the field shows no signs of slowing down: OpenAI is in talks to double its valuation to $300 billion, while rival Anthropic is closing a round at a valuation of $60 billion.

Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on February 9, 2025.

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