Imbue secures $200M at $1B valuation to develop AI system

Imbue, led by CEO Kanjun Qui, an AI research company previously known as Generally Intelligent, has successfully secured a $200M Series B funding round, which brings the company's valuation to over $1B.

• Who's Got Their Back? Major contributors to this round include the Astera Institute, Nvidia, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, and Notion co-founder Simon Last. This puts Imbue's total funding at $220M.

• Ultimate Goal: The company aims to utilize this funding to speed up the development of AI systems that can reason and code. Additionally, they aim to create practical AI agents that can meet larger goals and function safely in the real world.

• Selling Point: Imbue's uniqueness lies in their AI models' ability to reason robustly, a key factor that they believe is a barrier to effective AI agents. The firm is currently focusing on developing models that prove "internally useful", including ones that can code. They argue that code can enhance reasoning and is one of the most effective ways for models to execute actions on a machine.

• Other Investments: Imbue is also investing in building its own AI and machine learning tools and conducting research to understand the learning process in large language models. The company's training is conducted on a compute cluster co-designed by Nvidia, containing 10,000 GPUs from Nvidia’s H100 series.

Imbue aspires to give everyone the power to build robust, custom AI agents with their systems.