Nvidia backs Reflection AI in $2 billion fundraising round
When DeepSeek R1 was released at the end of last year, it shook the AI world to its core.
The scrappy Chinese startup developed a competitive open-weights reasoning model that bested several state-of-the-art models from OpenAI and Google in several benchmarks.
The release caused the industry to question its bet on massive AI infrastructure over clever engineering done with constrained resources.
American startup Reflection AI thinks the West needs its own DeepSeek, and plans on being the company to build it.
On Thursday, Reflection AI announced it had raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, with Nvidia leading the fundraising round with an $800 million investment.
Reflection does not appear to have developed a frontier-scale model yet, but has built the software needed to train one. A $2 billion cash infusion will certainly help with the company’s training costs, but by comparison, DeepSeek’s R1 model was trained for only $249,000.
The release caused the industry to question its bet on massive AI infrastructure over clever engineering done with constrained resources.
American startup Reflection AI thinks the West needs its own DeepSeek, and plans on being the company to build it.
On Thursday, Reflection AI announced it had raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, with Nvidia leading the fundraising round with an $800 million investment.
Reflection does not appear to have developed a frontier-scale model yet, but has built the software needed to train one. A $2 billion cash infusion will certainly help with the company’s training costs, but by comparison, DeepSeek’s R1 model was trained for only $249,000.