Raising money from venture capitalist is like going into the Shark Tank. It's like winning the lottery. You can approach thousands of companies and all of them will reject you for millions of reasons. And rightfully so, most tech startups fail or fail to generate any revenue. If they do generate revenue it's a long time after incurring tons of cost and only return on investments is an exit strategy of being bought out by tech giants.
Normally you need a strong team, a working product, a roadmap of features, a flashy website, sales charisma, genius level IQ, and so much more. And even then it's a roll of the dice. If you do score funding then it's just to keep afloat for a few more months or most of the company now belongs to shareholders.
Then there's Safe Superintelligence Inc. a company you've never heard of. It doesn't have a working product, their website was probably written in notepad, the contact form doesn't collect potential customer information or a waitlist database. The team they are still assembling. The product roadmap isn't revealed. The three founders doesn't have a bio page or any of the employees. The company is only a few months old so they are really early stage. Yet they scored a billion dollars and not just valuation and a percentage (estimated at $5 billion) but a check for a billion dollars. WHAT!!! HOW?
Well a few things…one of the founders Ilya Sutskever was the former chief scientist at OpenAI. So they got the brains, so do many other startups. That's a lot of money riding on a couple of people. Any lender would say this is insane. They might be right.
Conclusion
However when you look at what a billion dollar goes into then it kinda makes sense. Hardware is expensive, each GPU cost $200,000+ and you need lots of them. Then you need high priced talent who are very specialized in the AI space. You also need a scalability team to do the usual stuff like cluster management, web development, sales, etc.
When you look at it that way it's an asset, the hardware and the team is what is valuable to investors. Congrats to the SSI team, and we wish you tons of luck and success.
Pat Bhakta
Founder
