AI Lab Imbue Gets $200M From Nvidia, Others; Hits $1B Valuation

Imbue locked down a massive $200 million Series B that values the AI research lab at $1 billion.

The new round included participation from Astera Institute, Nvidia, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, Notion co-founder Simon Last, and others.

The San Francisco-based startup, formerly Generally Intelligent, trains foundation models optimized for “reasoning,” which the company is first applying to develop AI agents that can code. The company says its goal is to enable anyone to build custom AI agents.

“We believe reasoning is the primary blocker to effective AI agents,” the company wrote in a blog announcing the round. “Robust reasoning is necessary for effective action. It involves the ability to deal with uncertainty, to know when to change our approach, to ask questions and gather new information, to play out scenarios and make decisions, to make and discard hypotheses, and generally to deal with the complicated, hard-to-predict nature of the real world.”

The startup has raised $220 million to date, per Crunchbase.

Nvidia and AI

It’s fair to say no company has benefited more from the current AI craze than Nvidia, which has watched its stock go up 220% since the beginning of the year and break the $1 trillion market cap mark.

The Santa Clara, California-based chip company leads the market for graphics processing units used to train AI models.

Nvidia also has been an early mover to invest heavily in the AI space and startups.

Just a week ago, Nvidia took part in a $155 million Series C for Israel-based AI startup AI21 Labs, which offers text-based generative AI services for enterprises.

Nvidia also has participated in several other huge rounds related to the generative AI space:

• Adept AI’s $350 million Series B in March that gave the San Francisco-based startup a post-money valuation of at least $1 billion. Adept is developing AI models that do more than respond to text commands — like chatbots do — but actually turn that command into actions. In theory, the company’s generative AI could help users do tasks from browsing the internet to navigating enterprise software tools.
• Toronto-based Cohere’s $270 million round in May. The startup’s AI platform competes with OpenAI.
• Drone startup Skydio’s $230 million Series E at a $2.2 billion valuation in February.

AI has helped Nvidia get ahead in the chip design space, and it seems it will invest whatever it takes for that space to continue to grow.

Further reading:

• AI Investing Boom Is Not New To Tech Giants (At Least Not Their VC Arms)

Illustration: Dom Guzman