Reflection AI Secures $2B Funding, Poised to Rival OpenAI
Reflection AI, a startup brainchild of ex-Google DeepMind researchers, has successfully raised a whopping $2 billion in funding. This impressive feat pegs the company’s valuation at $8 billion, a remarkable 15-fold increase from its $545 million valuation just seven months prior.
The firm was co-founded by Misha Laskin, former project lead of DeepMind’s Gemini, and Ioannis Antonoglou, co-creator of AlphaGo. Reflection AI is carving out a niche for itself as an open-source alternative to the more closed-off AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The funding round saw leading contributions from NVIDIA, and included participation from Eric Schmidt, Citi, Sequoia Capital, among other notable investors.
Initially, Reflection AI’s focus was on autonomous coding agents. However, the company has now pivoted towards building frontier-scale language models. These models are aimed at rivalling Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek, as well as Western behemoths such as Meta. The company’s first text-based model is slated for release in early 2025, and will be trained on tens of trillions of tokens.
Boasting a 60-strong team of AI researchers and engineers, all handpicked from top labs, Reflection AI has developed what it terms as a large-scale training platform. This platform is capable of developing massive Mixture-of-Experts models. The newly acquired capital will primarily be used to fund the compute resources needed for training these advanced AI systems.
Source: TechCrunch