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Venture capitalists have always been happy to back pre-profit companies. Back in the halcyon ZIRP era, they became happy to finance pre-revenue companies. But at least even Juicero, Wag and the Fyre Festival had an actual product.
From Bloomberg over the weekend:
OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever is raising more than $1 billion for his start-up at a valuation of over $30 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter — vaulting the nascent venture into the ranks of the world’s most valuable private technology companies.
Greenoaks Capital Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, is leading the deal for the start-up, Safe Superintelligence, and plans to invest $500 million, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Greenoaks is also an investor in AI companies Scale AI and Databricks Inc.
The round marks a significant valuation jump from the $5 billion that Sutskever’s company was worth before, according to Reuters, which earlier reported some details of the new funding. The financing talks are ongoing and the details could still change.
OK, so a jump from a $5bn valuation less than half a year ago to $30bn must mean that Safe Superintelligence has an absolutely killer product right?
SSI focuses on developing safe AI systems. It isn’t generating revenue yet and doesn’t intend to sell AI products in the near future.
“This company is special in that its first product will be the safe superintelligence, and it will not do anything else up until then,” Sutskever told Bloomberg in June. “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.”
Here are some other things valued at about $30bn or less:
United Airlines, Société Générale, Maersk, Pernod Ricard, Publicis, Commerzbank, Ryanair, Prudential, Vodafone, Legal & General, Pearson, Reddit, EQT, Martin Marietta, Tradeweb, Warner Bros, Estée Lauder . . . you probably get the drift by now.
Further reading:
— This is nuts. When’s the crash? (FTAV)
