Reflection AI Secures Record-Breaking $2B Funding at a $8B Valuation

Brooklyn-based startup Reflection AI has successfully closed an astounding $2 billion funding round at an $8 billion valuation. This marks one of the most significant funding rounds in the history of AI.

The Series B round, announced on October 9, 2025, signifies a remarkable 15x valuation increase from just seven months prior when the company was valued at $545 million. Reflection AI was founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou.

Positioning itself as America’s response to open-source AI development, Reflection AI aims to challenge both closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Chinese competitors such as DeepSeek. Nvidia led the investment round, with contributions from heavyweight investors including Eric Schmidt, Citi, Sequoia, Lightspeed, and 1789 Capital.

The funding will empower the company to secure the massive compute resources necessary to train frontier AI models. In a statement, the company said, “We built something once thought possible only inside the world’s top labs: a large-scale LLM and reinforcement learning platform capable of training massive Mixture-of-Experts models at frontier scale.”

Reflection AI has plans to release its first frontier language model in early 2026, trained on tens of trillions of tokens. The 60-person team, primarily comprised of researchers poached from DeepMind and OpenAI, signifies the growing trend of elite AI talent forming independent ventures.

Source: TechCrunch