X’s Former CEO Parag Agrawal Rakes In $30 Mn For His New AI Venture: Here’s What You Need To Know

Parag Agrawal, who served as the chief executive officer of X (erstwhile Twitter) for a year until Elon Musk assumed control of the social media platform in late 2022, has reportedly secured an initial funding of $30 Mn for his new artificial intelligence (AI) startup. 

Agrawal, who has kept a low profile since leaving Twitter, is currently working on building his new venture.

Here’s Everything You Need To Know About Agrawal’s AI Startup

What Does The Startup Do?

Agrawal’s latest venture is dedicated to pioneering software designed specifically for developers working with large language models (LLMs), The Information reported.

LLMs are the underlying technology that powers the AI chatbots that we have started to use in our lives.

Though the venture’s name and product details have not been revealed, people close to the matter have disclosed that the venture is similar to platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. 

Agrawal’s entry into the realm of artificial intelligence reflects a broader trend among tech leaders who are increasingly capitalising on this rapidly advancing field.

Who Have Backed The Startup?

The funding for Agrawal’s new AI startup was led by Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, an early backer of OpenAI.

The round also saw participation from venture firms – Index Ventures and First Round Capital. However, the specifics of the funding have not been publicly disclosed.

Who Are The Potential Competitors Of The Startup?

Interestingly, the trend of entrepreneurs not sticking to one particular venture in the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem is not new. With his latest venture, Agrawal also joins the list of CXOs who started up again.

Adding to this wave of AI-centric innovation, in the recent past, we have seen Bhavish Aggarwal, the founder of Ola, launch an AI company, Krutrim, which claims to have its focus set on constructing foundational LLMs for such languages. Tech giant Google is reportedly planning to invest another $4 Mn in Indian conversational artificial intelligence startup Corover.

Sridhar Vembu, the founder of Zoho, announced plans to create a proprietary LLM with capabilities encompassing summarization, paraphrasing, and adaptability to novel tasks. Meanwhile, Tech Mahindra is working on Project Indus, an open-source Indic language-based LLM. Similarly, numerous AI startups, including Sarvam AI, SoketLabs, CoRover.ai, are actively engaged in developing LLM models with a focus on the Indic languages.

This also comes at a time when, Elon Musk-led xAI is rapidly expanding its generative artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot Grok AI into India.

OpenAI which does not have an official presence in India, is also navigating the country’s policies and regulations to venture into the AI space. 

The upcoming startup will compete with the likes of Krutrim, Corover, Sarvam AI, SoketLabs, OpenAI, xAI, among others.

As per an Inc42 report, “India’s Generative AI Startup Landscape, 2023”, the GenAI market in India is poised to see a substantial increase from $1.1 Bn in 2023 to over $17 Bn by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 48%.