Imbue, a company in artificial intelligence, announced on Thursday that it has raised over $210 million in cash overall after securing an extra $12 million in follow-on investment to its Series B round.
The Alexa Fund of Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt are investors in the round extension. Imbue announced its $200 million Series B investment with a valuation of over $1 billion in September.
Imbue is a member of a select group of businesses with the financial resources to create foundation models and AI systems trained on big datasets capable of carrying out various jobs, from writing to coding. Foundation model developers like Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which released the successful product ChatGPT late last year, are driving the growth of generative AI.
Imbue is developing a model allowing autonomous agents, or AI systems, to carry out more complicated personal and professional duties like organizing meetings or doing intricate data analysis without direct supervision.
Imbue CEO Kanjun Qiu stated in an interview that developing AI with stronger reasoning capabilities is the key to developing AI systems that can carry out significant, real-world jobs.
“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.”
Qiu cited Imbue’s current emphasis on recruiting a data executive and more product-focused engineers as evidence that Imbue will utilize the cash to purchase computing resources and hire additional personnel.
