Safe Superintelligence raises $1B

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the company Ilya Sutskever founded with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy after leaving OpenAI, raised roughly $1 billion, reported at a valuation of about $5 billion, less than three months after its founding was announced. Investors included Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global and SV Angel, according to reporting on the round. SSI did not disclose the figures itself.

The round was notable for what backed it: no released product, no published model, no reported revenue, and no stated timeline for shipping one. SSI’s public position since its June 2024 launch had been that it would pursue “one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence” without the commercial release pressure that, Sutskever had argued, undermined safety work at labs racing to ship products. Reporting on the raise noted the funding came entirely in cash rather than the cloud-computing credits some AI infrastructure deals used in lieu of cash, though much of the money was expected to go toward purchasing the compute the company would need to train frontier models.

The size and speed of the round illustrated a broader pattern in the period: investors were increasingly willing to price AI labs primarily on the reputation of their founders rather than on conventional diligence over product, users or revenue. Sutskever’s record as OpenAI’s former chief scientist and a co-author of several of the field’s foundational techniques, combined with Gross’s and Levy’s own standing, was sufficient to draw a billion-dollar round from some of the most prominent venture firms in AI without a product demo. SSI’s valuation continued rising on the same basis, reaching roughly $32 billion in a further raise in April 2025.