Safe Superintelligence Commands $20B Valuation Without a Single Product

Key Takeaways

• Safe Superintelligence is reportedly in discussions to raise funding at a $20 billion valuation.
• The company previously raised $1 billion just three months after its launch.
• If achieved, the $20 billion price tag would signal investors’ confidence in founder Ilya Sutskever.

Less than seven months after its founding, Safe Superintelligence (SSI) is reportedly in talks to raise funding at a valuation of $20 billion.

The figure is astronomical for a company that hasn’t released a single product or published any research papers describing its progress.

Instead, the high valuation seems to rest entirely on founder Ilya Sutskever’s reputation.

OpenAI Alumni Ilya Sutskever Seeking Billions

When Sutskever left his role at OpenAI in May 2024, the company lost a prolific AI researcher who was behind some of the most significant machine learning breakthroughs this century.

With little more than a roughly-formed idea to develop “safe superintelligence,” it took Sutskever just three months to raise a billion dollars for his new AI safety venture.

Contributors to that initial funding round included heavyweight tech investors Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.

According to Reuters, which broke the story on Friday, Feb. 7, both new and existing investors are participating in the latest funding talks.

SSI Among Fastest-Growing AI Startup Valuations

If SSI hits its target valuation, it will enter the record books as one of the fastest-growing startups ever.

For comparison, OpenAI took eight years to hit a valuation of 27 billion—a feat it achieved with a $300 million funding round in April 2023.

In recent years, AI startup valuations have ballooned, with companies like Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI raising sums that would once have been impossible for such early-stage ventures.

xAI is especially notable in terms of the speed with which it has raised capital. Fourteen months after its founding, xAI closed a $6 billion Series B at a post-money price of $24 billion.

Six months later, in November 2024, that figure jumped to $50 billion at the startup’s next funding round.

Product Runway Remains a Mystery

Aside from a vague commitment to AI safety, it is difficult to ascertain exactly what SSI plans to develop.

The startup has no official social media accounts and no marketing team. Its website is equally sparse, consisting only of a single message from Sutskever and fellow co-founders Daniel Gross and Daniel Lev.

Notably, their message rejects the hype and self-aggrandizement that is often characteristic of many other startups. The usual references to “product-market fit” and “ambitious growth plans” are also conspicuously absent.

Instead, the SSI founders claim their “singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles” and that the company is “insulated from short-term commercial pressures.”

Whatever they are working on, the SSI team (reportedly just ten people in September 2024) must have something to show investors.

Otherwise, how did they manage to justify the $20 billion price tag?