Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence reportedly raising $1B+ on $30B valuation

Safe Superintelligence Inc., a company co-founded by former OpenAI employee and co-founder Ilya Sutskever is reportedly in the process of raising a new round of more than $1 billion on a valuation of more than $30 billion.

Bloomberg reports, referencing a person “who asked not to be identified discussing private information,” that Greenoaks Capital Partners is leading the round. Bloomberg’s report follows a similar report from Reuters on Feb. 7 claiming that Safe Superintelligence was seeking to raise money on at least a $20 billion valuation.

Safe Superintelligence has previously raised more than $1 billion in funding on a $5 billion valuation in September. Previous investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital Operations, DST Global Ltd., SV Angel and Northern Four Dragon Gate Capital.

The company was founded in June 2024, one month after Sutskever (pictured) left OpenAI following his attempts to oust Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman in November 2023 over safety concerns over OpenAI’s models moving towards artificial general intelligence. As the name suggests, Safe Superintelligence is aiming to build safer artificial intelligence models.

“Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our time,” the company’s founders Sutskever, Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy write on the company website — which, eight months after the company launched, consists of one page of text and nothing else. “SSI is our mission, our name and our entire product roadmap because it is our sole focus.”

The founders said their team, investors and business model are “all aligned” to achieve SSI. “We approach safety and capabilities in tandem, as technical problems to be solved through revolutionary engineering and scientific breakthroughs,” they said. “We plan to advance capabilities as fast as possible while making sure our safety always remains ahead.”

So far, SSI has not launched a product. Sutskever told Bloomberg previously that the company’s first product will be “safe superintelligence and it will not do anything else up until then.” He added that it “will be fully insulated from the outside pressures of having to deal with a large and complicated product and having to be stuck in a competitive rat race.”

With no product to show, the new funding could be described as a leap of faith in Sutskever, or as Reuters has previously noted, “what has fueled interest among investors is Sutskever’s reputation and the novel approach he has said his team is working on.”

The news that SSI is raising new funding comes as investors continue to flood into AI companies, such as Anthropic PBC, which raised $1 billion from Google LLC in January and OpenAI, which raised $6.6 billion on a $157 billion valuation in October.

Photo: OpenAI