Safe Superintelligence

Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) is an AI research lab with, in its own words, one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence. It calls itself a straight-shot SSI lab and says its business model insulates safety, security and progress from short-term commercial pressures. It describes itself as an American company with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.^[1]

The company's public statement of approach is short. It says building safe superintelligence is the most important technical problem of our time, that SSI is its mission, its name and its entire product roadmap, and that it treats safety and capabilities as technical problems to be solved in tandem, advancing capabilities as fast as possible while keeping safety ahead. It says its team, investors and business model are all aligned to that single goal, with no distraction from management overhead or product cycles.^[1]

Nvidia said it invested after gaining rare access to SSI's closely guarded research and that SSI had reached significant research milestones. In a statement, Sutskever said the lab has research that is worthy of scaling up and that access to a big Nvidia computer would let it do so. SSI posted that the investment would let it 10x its compute in the next 12 months, and that it had reached the point where its research is worth scaling.^[2],[3],[4]

The company has no product and no revenue. It has said it does not intend to sell AI products in the near future. SSI says the point of its 2026 Nvidia investment is compute: the money is meant to let it multiply its available computing power roughly tenfold within a year, and the lab says its research has reached the point where it is worth scaling.^[4]

SSI was founded in June 2024 by former OpenAI researchers Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Levy and Daniel Gross. At launch it said it was trying to build a safe form of superintelligence without being distracted by revenue targets or the need to ship commercial products. The company said little publicly in its first two years. Gross, who had been serving as chief executive, left in 2025 to join Meta's Superintelligence Labs unit.^[2]

Sutskever co-founded OpenAI and was its chief scientist. He co-authored AlexNet with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, and before founding SSI he led OpenAI's Superalignment team, leaving OpenAI months after a failed attempt to remove CEO Sam Altman.^[3]

The two companies also said they would work together on Nvidia's current and future AI systems, with SSI contributing research insights.^[5],[3]

SSI raised $1 billion at its founding in 2024 at a $5 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch. In April 2025 the Financial Times reported it had raised an additional $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation; the round was reportedly led by Greenoaks, and SSI did not comment. TechCrunch lists its backers as including Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Lightspeed Venture Partners and GV. The Next Web, citing the same round history, put total funding before the Nvidia deal at roughly $3 billion from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and DST Global.^[3],[6],[4]

The size of Nvidia's July 2026 investment was not disclosed by either company; SSI called it substantial. A source told TechCrunch it ran to multiple billions, and Bloomberg reported the deal size at $5 billion. Nvidia was already an SSI investor before the compute partnership. No new valuation has been disclosed since the $32 billion figure reported in April 2025.^[3],[4]

Ilya Sutskever leads the company. Daniel Levy is a co-founder. Daniel Gross co-founded SSI and served as chief executive until he left for Meta. SSI says it is assembling a small team of engineers and researchers focused only on safe superintelligence, and recruits in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.^[2],[1]