Inflection AI Raises $1.3 Billion to Continue Developing ‘Personal AI’

Inflection AI has raised $1.3 billion in a funding round led by high-profile tech industry investors.

Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt and NVIDIA led the round, Inflection AI said in a Thursday (June 29) press release.

The company will use the funding to continue its work on “a new class of AI,” a product called Pi that delivers both text and voice conversations, advice and information and serves as a “kind and supportive companion,” according to release.

“Personal AI is going to be the most transformational tool of our lifetimes,” Inflection AI CEO and Co-Founder Mustafa Suleyman said in the release. “This is truly an inflection point.”

Inflection AI launched Pi, which is its first product, in May, according to the release.

To support the training and deployment of a new generation of large-scale AI models, the company is building an AI cluster that includes 22,000 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs — a cluster that Inflection AI said would be the second, and close to the top, entry in the TOP500 list of supercomputers.

A system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory tops the June 2023 list, according to the TOP500.

“A powerful benefit of the AI revolution is the ability to use natural, conversational language to interact with supercomputers to simplify aspects of our everyday lives,” NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in the release. “The world-class team at Inflection AI is helping to lead this groundbreaking work, deploying NVIDIA AI technology to develop, train and deploy massive generative AI models that enable amazing personal digital assistants.”

Inflection AI was founded in early 2022 and is set up as a Public Benefit Corporation, according to the press release.

The company raised $225 million in its first round of funding around the time of its founding, the release said. The new round brings its total funding to $1.525 billion.

This news comes on the heels of several other funding rounds for AI-focused companies.

On the same day, Thursday, generative AI platform Typeface was valued at $1 billion after raising $165 million.

About a month earlier, in late May, AI-powered software platform Builder.ai raised $250 million and AI firm Anthropic raised $450 million.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI said it received a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment” from Microsoft in January. Bloomberg News pegged the value of the funding at $10 billion over 10 years.