Artificial Intelligence startup Imbue announced on Thursday that it has secured an additional $12 million in follow-on funding for its Series B round. With this new investment, Imbue’s total funds raised now exceed $210 million in cash. The investors in this round extension include Amazon.com’s Alexa Fund and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Last month, Imbue had announced its Series B round of $200 million, which valued the company at over $1 billion.
Imbue is part of a select group of companies that have sufficient funding to develop foundation models. These are AI systems trained on massive datasets that can perform a wide range of tasks, including writing and coding. The rise of generative AI can be attributed to developers of foundation models such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which introduced the successful product ChatGPT last year.
The primary focus of Imbue is creating a model to enable autonomous agents. These AI systems are designed to perform complex personal and work tasks, such as scheduling meetings and conducting data analysis, without requiring close supervision.
In an interview, Imbue CEO Kanjun Qiu emphasized the importance of enhancing the reasoning capabilities of AI systems for performing large-scale, real-world tasks. He stated, “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.”
The funding secured by Imbue will be utilized to purchase compute resources and expand its workforce. Qiu mentioned that the company’s current focus is hiring a data executive and more product-focused engineers.
Anna Tong reporting from San Francisco
Edited by Richard Chang
