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After raising $1.3B, Inflection is eaten alive by its biggest investor, Microsoft

In June 2023, Inflection announced it had raised $1.3 billion to build what it called "more personal AI." The lead investor was Microsoft. Today, less

Reid Hoffman will stay behind with new CEO Sean White to try to salvage what’s left of the company, which, I feel I have to repeat, raised $1.3 billion dollars 9 months ago and$225 million in mid-2022. It was fine, but even with all that money they couldn’t keep up with the rapid advances in capabilities and services being offered by OpenAI (which Microsoft, hedging its bets, also backs), Google’s Gemini (which has the home field advantage in search), and Anthropic (which made its play for safe, boring applications at which AI can excel). We’ll see if Suleyman and Simonyan can lead the new AI division effectively — I don’t know about you, but I would be pretty skeptical of their instincts after seeing a billion-dollar enterprise evaporate so quickly.

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