Reflection AI, a startup founded just last year by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, a whopping 15x leap from its $545 million valuation just seven months ago. The company, which originally focused on autonomous coding agents, is now positioning itself as both an open source alternative to closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and a Western equivalent to Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek.
The startup was launched in March 2024 by Misha Laskin, who led reward modeling for DeepMind’s Gemini project, and Ioannis Antonoglou, who co-created AlphaGo, the AI system that famously beat the world champion in the board game Go in 2016. Their background developing these very advanced AI systems is central to their pitch, which is that the right AI talent can build frontier models outside established tech giants.
Along with its new round, Reflection AI announced that it has recruited a team of top talent from DeepMind and OpenAI, and built an advanced AI training stack that it promises will be open for all. Perhaps most importantly, Reflection AI says it has “identified a scalable commercial model that aligns with our open intelligence strategy.”
Reflection AI’s team currently numbers about 60 people — mostly AI researchers and engineers across infrastructure, data training, and algorithm development, per Laskin, the company’s CEO. Reflection AI has secured a compute cluster and hopes to release a frontier language model next year that’s trained on “tens of trillions of tokens,” he told TechCrunch.
“We built something once thought possible only inside the world’s top labs: a large-scale LLM and reinforcement learning platform capable of training massive Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) models at frontier scale,” Reflection AI wrote in a post on X. “We saw the effectiveness of our approach first-hand when we applied it to the critical domain of au …