Elon Musk’s XAI Raises $6 Bln In New Funding Round

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup X.AI Corp., doing business as xAI, has raised $6 billion in its new funding round, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. With the latest capital raise, the company reportedly stands at more than $40 billion valuation.

The new funding round brings xAI’s total raised fund to $12 billion, including the $6 billion it had secured in May in a Series B round. In November, CNBC had reported that xAI, which competes with AI developers OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others, was aiming for a $50 billion valuation.

As per the filing, 97 investors participated in the funding, with the minimum investment of $77,593. Meanwhile, the company is yet to reveal the list of supported investors.

The investors reportedly included Valor Equity Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, along with Qatar Investment Authority, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. Only those investors participated in the previous round were permitted to participate in the new one, it was reported.

Investors who backed Musk’s Twitter acquisition reportedly were given access to up to 25 percent of xAI’s shares.

xAI, founded by Musk in March 2023, had unveiled its first AI chatbot technology named Grok in November last year, which competes with OpenAI’s highly popular Generative AI chatbot ChatGPT. Earlier this year, Musk stated that xAI would open source its AI chatbot.

xAI’s Grok has real-time knowledge of the world through the X platform, formerly Twitter. In August, xAI introduced the beta version of its latest AI assistant, Grok 2, with fewer restrictions on the types of images that can be generated. The company also launched Grok-2 mini, a smaller and faster variant of Grok-2.

Among rivals, OpenAI, which was co-founded by Musk in 2015, in October raised $6.6 billion in its new funding round to boost its efforts in artificial general intelligence or AGI for humanity’s benefit. With this, its post-money valuation was $157 billion at that time. Musk had stepped down from OpenAI board in 2018 over indifferences.

As per the latest report, Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. is planning to purchase OpenAI stock worth $1.5 billion.

Further, AI startup Anthropic recently received an additional $4 billion commitment from Amazon.com, bringing its total investment from the firm to $8 billion. The company also received a $2 billion commitment from Google.