Ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal raises $30M for AI startup

Former Twitter (now X) CEO Parag Agrawal, who left the company in 2022 after Elon Musk took over, has raised $30 million in funding for his artificial intelligence-focussed startup in a round led by OpenAI's early backer, Khosla Ventures, according to a report by The Information.

Apart from Vinod Khosla's venture capital firm, Index Ventures and First Round Capital also participated in the round, The Information reported, citing two sources familiar with the deal.

Agrawal's AI startup is building software for developers and customers of large language models (LLMs), according to the report which did not mention the name of the startup or any other specifics.

Agrawal's foray into AI-verse follows in the footsteps of other tech entrepreneurs who have jumped onto the bandwagon, betting on AI and its numerous use cases to drive the future.

In India, Bhavish Aggarwal, Founder and CEO of Ola, is busy setting up his own AI startup called Krutrim SI Designs--again, an LLM that will be able to generate content in 10 Indic languages, and understand 20.

The company claims that its library to support Indic languages is larger than even OpenAI's GPT-4.

Krutrim has raised $24 million in debt from Matrix Partners, according to regulatory filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA). The company is looking to raise up to $100 million in funding, according to an Entrackr report in August.