By Anna Tong
Artificial Intelligence startup Imbue said on Thursday it has secured an additional $12 million in follow-on funding to its Series B round, bringing its total raised to over $210 million in cash.
Investors in the round extension are Amazon.com’s Alexa Fund and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. In September, Imbue announced its Series B round of $200 million at a valuation of over $1 billion.
Imbue is part of a small group of companies with enough money to develop foundation models, AI systems trained on massive datasets that can perform a variety of tasks from writing to coding. The surge in generative AI is being driven by foundation model developers such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which launched the hit product ChatGPT late last year.
Imbue is focused on creating a model for enabling so-called autonomous agents, AI systems which promise to perform more sophisticated personal and work tasks such as meeting scheduling or complex data analysis, without close supervision.
The key to AI systems that can perform large-scale, real-world tasks is creating AI that has better reasoning capabilities, Imbue CEO Kanjun Qiu said in an interview.
“We want to enable agents that people can actually use and that work reliably, and ultimately the vision is to reinvent the personal computer so that it’s actually truly personal.”
Imbue will use the funding to buy compute resources and hire more employees, Qiu said, citing its current focus on hiring a data executive and more product-focused engineers.
(Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Richard Chang)
