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Reflection AI Raises $2B to Build Open-Source Frontier Models at $8B Valuation

Reflection AI, founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, has raised $2 billion in new funding at an $8 billion valuation, marking one of the largest-ever rounds for an early-stage AI company. The raise represents a 15x increase from its $545 million valuation just seven months ago.

The company, which began developing autonomous coding agents, is now positioning itself as an open-source alternative to closed frontier AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, and as a Western counterpart to China’s DeepSeek. Reflection AI has assembled a team of 60 researchers and engineers — many from DeepMind and OpenAI — and built an advanced AI training stack capable of large-scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model training.

Led by CEO Misha Laskin, the company plans to release its first frontier language model in 2025, trained on tens of trillions of tokens. Reflection AI says it will make model weights publicly available to support global innovation while pursuing commercial partnerships with enterprises and governments seeking to build sovereign AI systems.

The $2 billion round drew participation from a broad range of investors including Nvidia, DST Global, Disruptive, B Capital, Lightspeed, GIC, Sequoia, CRV, Citi, and industry leaders Eric Schmidt and Eric Yuan. The new funding will expand compute infrastructure and accelerate development of open, high-performance AI models designed to keep Western innovation competitive on the global frontier.

James Dargan
About the author
James Dargan

James Dargan is a writer and researcher at The AI Insider. His focus is on the AI startup ecosystem and he writes articles on the space that have a tone accessible to the average reader.

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