Why Big Tech Is Pouring Billions Into Ilya Sutskever’s $32B Safe Superintelligence Startup

Few startups can raise billions with no product. Even fewer can do it twice. But Safe Superintelligence isn’t just any startup, and Ilya Sutskever isn’t just any founder.

The former OpenAI chief scientist has once again captured Silicon Valley’s attention, this time with a $2 billion funding round that pushes his stealth-mode company’s valuation to $32 billion. That makes Safe Superintelligence (SSI) one of the most valuable private AI firms on the planet, despite releasing no commercial product to date.

The round, led by Greenoaks with participation from Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz, comes amid a market increasingly wary of hype. Still, investors are willing to bet that Ilya Sutskever, known for helping birth ChatGPT and OpenAI’s core research labs, can build something even more ambitious this time.

The Mission to Climb A New Mountain

Founded in mid-2024 after Ilya Sutskever’s highly publicized departure from OpenAI, SSI is still operating mostly in the shadows. Its website is a placeholder. Its pitch? One product, one goal: a safe superintelligence.

Ilya Sutskever launched the company alongside Daniel Gross, formerly of Apple AI, and Daniel Levy, an AI researcher. Together, the trio positioned SSI around a singular focus, developing an AI system more powerful than anything currently in the market, but aligned with human values.

The startup’s name is a mission statement in itself. While rivals like Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI sprint toward more capable large language models, SSI claims to be building something more deliberate and long-term.

People familiar with the company say it’s attempting to leapfrog current model limitations, focusing not just on scale, but on novel ways to train and govern advanced systems. That said, the company has kept even investors largely in the dark.

What little is known stems from a cryptic comment Ilya Sutskever made last year: his team had “identified a new mountain to climb”, a different vision from what he pursued at OpenAI.

AI Startup Race Heats Up

SSI’s valuation jump from $5 billion in September to $32 billion now puts it firmly in the top tier of AI startups. For comparison, rival Anthropic recently secured billions in new capital from Amazon and Google and sits near the same valuation mark.

Alphabet, through both its venture arm and Google Cloud, joined the round. As part of the deal, Google is selling SSI access to its in-house AI chips, tensor processing units, or TPUs, marking a strategic pivot in how it competes with Nvidia.

“With these foundational model builders, the gravity is increasing dramatically over to us,” Darren Mowry, a managing director in charge of Google’s partnerships with startups, said in an interview with Reuters.

Nvidia also reportedly participated in the raise, doubling down on its position as the chipmaker of choice for the AI industry. Between TPUs and GPUs, SSI now has access to some of the most powerful compute infrastructure available.

The partnerships also reflect a broader strategy from cloud and chip giants: back the builders who will need your infrastructure the most.

High Valuation, Higher Expectations

Despite the towering valuation, SSI hasn’t released a product, published a research paper, or demoed a model. Its first system is still in development. That hasn’t stopped it from drawing comparisons with the likes of OpenAI and Google DeepMind.

What’s different this time is the complete absence of a commercial roadmap. SSI has no public API, no monetization strategy, and no apparent interest in enterprise deals, yet. Investors, it seems, are betting that alignment and safety-first AGI will eventually justify the wait.

Ilya Sutskever’s exit from OpenAI came after internal turmoil. He was widely reported to have played a role in the short-lived ouster of CEO Sam Altman, a move that ultimately failed and fractured OpenAI’s leadership team. Following his departure, OpenAI dissolved its superalignment group, which Ilya Sutskever had led.

His former colleague Mira Murati, OpenAI’s ex-CTO, is also building her own AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab, which is reportedly raising a comparable round. But unlike Murati, who’s been public about her company’s vision, Ilya Sutskever is playing the long game, quite silently.

The Bigger Picture

SSI’s emergence as a $32 billion player signals something deeper than investor enthusiasm. It’s a marker of a broader shift: the gravitational pull of AGI is concentrated around a handful of labs, and their influence over infrastructure, investment, and future regulation is only growing.

In this new AI gold rush, the true differentiator won’t just be model performance. It will be trust, safety, and long-term survivability.

And Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence is betting that it can lead on all three fronts.