This Brooklyn-Based AI Company Just Raised $2 Billion to Compete With DeepSeek

A Brooklyn startup just raised $2 billion to build a rival to DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company. Called Reflection AI, the company is now valued at about $8 billion, up some 15-fold from last March, when it announced $130 million in funding. The company is less than two years old. Reflection, which launched in March 2024, originally aimed to build a “superintelligent autonomous coding system,” and use that as a jumping off point. Now, it is working on building an open alternative to the types of closed frontier models that giants like OpenAI are developing. In other words, Reflection wants to be the U.S. answer to China’s DeepSeek. “AI is becoming the technology layer that everything else runs on top of,” Reflection noted in a blog post about the funding. “But the frontier is currently concentrated in closed labs. If this continues, a handful of entities will control the capital, compute, and talent required to build AI, creating a runaway dynamic that locks everyone else out.” U.S. AI and crypto czar David Sacks praised Reflection on Thursday. “It’s great to see more American open-source AI models. A meaningful segment of the global market will prefer the cost, customizability, and control that open source offers. We want the U.S. to win this category too,” he posted on social media platform X. Aside from remaining globally competitive, Reflection says there are numerous benefits to frontier open intelligence, including safety, transparency, and accountability. (Frontier in this case refers to the most advanced, large-scale LLMs, like those currently in development behind closed doors at companies like OpenAI.) But it also flags the potential for misuse. High profile players in the space, like OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have publicly fretted about bad actors weaponizing AI; another concern is that others in the space are not putting in place adequate safeguards—even as Altman pushes to avoid regulation. OpenAI has since announced it is working on its own open model. “We believe the answer to AI safety is not ‘security through obscurity’ but rigorous science conducted in the open, where the global research community can contribute to solutions rather than a handful of companies making decisions behind closed doors,” Reflection’s blog says. The startup has spent the past year assembling a crack team of experts who have “pioneered breakthroughs including PaLM, Gemini, AlphaGo, AlphaCode, and AlphaProof, and contributed to ChatGPT and Character AI, among many others.” Its founders, Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, worked on DeepMind’s Gemini and go-playing AI AlphaGo, respectively. The company also noted that it developed a large language model and “reinforcement learning platform capable of training massive mixture-of-experts (MoE) models at frontier scale.” TechCrunch reported that MOE models are a type of architecture that powers these super advanced, frontier LLMs. “We saw the effectiveness of our approach firsthand when we applied it to the critical domain of autonomous coding. With this milestone unlocked, we’re now bringing these methods to general agentic reasoning,” the blog states. Reflection also stated it has come up with a commercial model that will allow the company to sustain itself, while developing frontier models. It aims to release its first model early next year, TechCrunch reported. BY CHLOE AIELLO @CHLOBO_ILO