The OpenAI Constellations

I would joke and say that nary a week goes by without entities in OpenAI's orbit being at least rumored to be raising a massive new round of funding. But it's not a joke. If anything, it undersells the pace and scope of capital deployment here. Case in point: just the past two days have brought news of Anthropic finalizing their new mega funding round and Safe Superintelligence closing in on their own massive new round.

On one hand, it's clearly a testament to the talent OpenAI was able to corral at various points over the past decade. On the other, obviously at least some of the buoyancy is directly related to that former affiliation. While the valuations themselves, at least from the outside, don't appear to be based on much beyond name and team and space, they're also clearly anchored by the valuation of the most famous AI company itself.

As it continues to rise, so must the satellites...

It's an interesting situation in that while many of the founders of these affiliates left OpenAI under situations that were less than ideal, to put it nicely, and sort of a shitshow, to put it less so, their fates still seem tied together in this way.

Yes, there's a hint of the "PayPal Mafia" here – the diaspora of talent that worked at the payments company and then went on to found many of Silicon Valley's iconic companies and/or firms. But I'm perhaps even more reminded of the "Tiger Cubs" – that is, the funds that spun out of Julian Robertson’s famous hedge fund, Tiger Management. The founders of Viking Global, Lone Pine Capital, Maverick Capital, Tiger Global, Coatue, and others all started under Julian Robertson’s firm, hence the term. Much as those firms were all doing essentially what Tiger Management had started, these OpenAI offshoots are all doing essentially what OpenAI started. Some would undoubtedly dispute that idea, but at the end of the day, they're all working towards the same high-level concepts at least.

So what if we call these former OpenAI affiliates the "Constellations" – a term which seems near and dear to the heart of the company itself.

And there are now so many that I feel the need to jot them down, alongside where they're currently valued or rumored to be valued with these new rounds coming together. I'm just going to go with the unicorns (or at least known unicorns!) here, as I'm sure there are dozens of other employees who also left and have started new companies. But we need to draw the line somewhere.

Ursa Major

• Anthropic would seem to be the elder statesmen here, started a whole four years ago in 2021 by Dario Amodei who was OpenAI's VP of Research. He brought over several other OpenAI folks to help start the company, and many more have since joined the effort from OpenAI. In total, they've now raised around $15B over many rounds, with the most recent valuation being $61.5B.
• Safe Superintelligence is the most secretive of the bunch, with only some very high-level details about Ilya Sutskever's new company being known to the public. If the newly reported round comes together, it would presumably push their total funding somewhere in the $3B range and the valuation to around $32B. The company is just 9 months old.
• Thinking Machines is actually even newer, having just been started by former OpenAI CTO (and CEO for that infamous coup weekend) Mira Murati. She also brought John Schulman, one of the OpenAI co-founders, and two other former OpenAI executives, Barret Zoph and Jonathan Lachman, with her. The company has apparently raised around $1B out of the gates at a roughly $9B valuation.
• xAI is also one of the newer constellations, having been started in 2023 – and boy would Elon Musk hate that framing – but Musk actually "left" OpenAI, which he co-founded, in all the way back in 2018. They're seemingly (and amazingly) about to have raised more than Anthropic has over that short timespan – though the current mega-round may still be in progress. That round, if it comes together, is said to value xAI around $75B, and could push the total capital raised close to $25B.

Ursa Minor

• Perplexity was founded in 2022 and CEO Aravind Srinivas previously had worked at OpenAI as a research scientist. The company has raised close to $1B and most recently was valued at $9B.¹
• Harvey also seems like it has to be included here since founder Gabe Pereyra worked at OpenAI for a year as a research scientist (whereas Srinivas had a mere 5-month stint at the company). It has raised something around $500M in total since its founding in 2022 and is currently valued at $3B.²
• Eureka Labs is a wild card here. There's no reported funding or valuation on the company, which was started last July. But if Andrej Karpathy did in fact raise money, given his pedigree as both a co-founder of OpenAI and the head of AI at Tesla, you can bet he could command a price north of $1B.

When added together, that's just over $40B raised by these startups in total. And that's an interesting number because it's what OpenAI itself is said to be in the process of raising right now in a single round being led by SoftBank. That round would value OpenAI at $300B, which would also put it on top of all the "constellations" combined, whose valuation in aggregate is just shy of $200B.

Prior to the SoftBank round, OpenAI itself has raised right around $18B in total over the years. So if we assume they get their fresh $40B on top of that, we're at $58B. Adding the "constellations" on top of that, we're just past $100B. And adding the "constellations" $190B+ aggregate valuation to OpenAI's $300B mark, we get $490B+.

In other words, current and former OpenAI entities have now raised $100B in aggregate over the past few years with a cumulative valuation right around $500B. It's just a staggering amount of capital at mind-boggling valuations in such a short amount of time. And again, it seemingly goes up each and every week!

One more thing: if we want to include OpenAI board members as well, Bret Taylor's Sierra has raised around $300M to date at a most recent valuation of $4.5B.³ Meanwhile, Adam D'Angelo's Quora – now also known for Poe, their AI aggregator – has also raised just about $300M (dating all the way back to 2010, when the world of investing was far more sane quaint). The most recent round was at a $500M valuation, which was a step-down from their $1.8B valuation in 2017. But again, the world was very different back then. Still, it's another $600m raised and roughly $5B in aggregate valuation you could add to the above numbers...

¹ There are already rumors of a $15B valuation offer for a new round, but the report says they're not seriously considering it now.

² GV, where I was a partner for over a decade, is an investor in Harvey. Google, which is the LP of GV, also has a large investment in Anthropic, of course, but I have no financial stake there.

³ My wife and I are personal investors in Sierra and my wife is an advisor to the company.