xAI, the San Francisco-headquartered artificial intelligence company founded by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, has raised £4.7 billion ($6b) in a new funding round.

Well-known venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Valor Equity Partners, and Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding, are among the backers.

The new funds are set to be used to “take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the research and development of future technologies,” the company stated.

The company also said that it will continue on its “steep trajectory of progress over the coming months, with multiple exciting technology updates and products soon to be announced.”

xAi was publicly announced just under a year ago, on 13 July 2023, and created in a bid to “understand the true nature of the universe.” Its about page states that the startup is “primarily focused on the development of advanced AI systems that are truthful, competent, and maximally beneficial for all of humanity.”

Training on xAI’s first flagship model, Grok, finished around a month later, in August 2023. In November, the startup then announced the early-access release of its conversational AI chatbot and the Grok-1 model underpinning it.

As of this month, X (previously Twitter) Premium users can use Grok and its 1.5 model on the platform.

In April last year, Musk said he was going to “start something which I call ‘TruthGPT’, or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” in an interview with Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

xAI was then announced in July, with members of the founding team having previously worked on and helped lead advancements in artificial intelligence including OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, as well as contributing methods that are commonly used in the field.

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xAi is not the first artificial intelligence company that the tech entrepreneur has founded. Musk was a co-founder and early funder of OpenAI, which launched in late 2015. He cut ties with the company three years later.

According to Semafor, people familiar with the matter said ties were severed after CEO Sam Altman and the other co-founders declined Musk’s proposal to take over the company and run it himself.