29 AI 'neolabs' have raised $23B — most have nothing to sell
What's the deal? Twenty-nine AI "neolabs" — startups founded by researchers who left established model-makers — have raised a combined $23 billion, according to a count by venture firm Radical VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. Yet fewer than 35% have released a commercial product.
Why now? The tally comes two years after Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence (SSI) kicked off the neolab era. SSI is now valued at $32 billion and has said it will not ship any product until it reaches "superintelligence."
The numbers: Just over half of the 29 labs have released any code at all, often only research demos. Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is reportedly in talks to raise at a valuation near $40 billion, on a reported annualised revenue run-rate of over $200 million.
Who's funding it? Nvidia has emerged as the era's kingmaker, with 32 separate investments in startup model-makers.
What could go wrong? The pattern echoes classic venture behaviour: enormous capital chasing unproven research bets staked on the reputations of star researchers. Most labs still have little commercial traction to show for the billions raised.
The signal: Investors are writing some of the biggest cheques in venture history on promise rather than product. Whether frontier-AI reputations translate into revenue remains the open question.
Read more: The Economist
