Go, PayPal Mafia: There is a novel technological mafi in the Silicon Valley. As a startup for chatgpt, Opennai is probably the largest AI player in the city. His meteoric enhance to a valuation worth $ 300 billion encouraged many employees to leave the AI giant to create their own startups.
Hype around OPENENAI is so high that some of these startups, such as the safe and sound superintellation of Ilyi Sutskever and Lab Machines Machines Merrati, were able to raise billions of dollars, without even starting the product.
But there are many other startups in the Openai Mafia ecosystem. They cover from the giant searching for AI to Xai, a novel owner of X (previously Twitter). There are also smaller outfits with futuristic plans, such as Living Carbon, which creates plants that suck more coal from the atmosphere, or prosper robotics that builds the robot.
Below is a summary of the most significant startups founded by OpenAI graduates.
Dario Amodei, Daniel Amodea and John Schulman – Antropic
The siblings of Dario and Daniel Amodei left OpenAI in 2021 to create their own startup, Anthropic based he advertised himself Focus on AI safety. Later, the co -founder of Opeli, John Schulman, joined Anthropic in 2024, undertaking to build a “safe Aga”. Opeli is supposedly many times greater than anthropic according to revenues ($ 3.7 billion compared to $ 1 billion In 2024 information provided). But Anthropic quickly became Openai’s biggest rival and was priced at $ 61.5 billion in March 2025.
ILYA SUTSKEVER – Unthreatening superintellation
Co -founder and main scientist Openai Ilya Sutskever left Openai in May 2024. After apparently he was part of the unsuccessful effort to replace the general director of Altman herself. Shortly afterwards he was a co -founder of a safe and sound superintelligence or SSI, with “one goal and one product: safe superintertheration,” he says. Detailed information on what exactly is the startup is scanty: there is no product and income yet. But investors are still demanding a song and was able to raise $ 2 billion, and his last valuation increased this month to $ 32 billion. SSI is based in Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv in Israel.
Mira Murati – Machine thinking laboratory
Mira Murati, Cto OpenAI, left OpenAI last year to set up her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, which emerged with Stealth in February 2025, announcing (rather vaguely) that she would build artificial intelligence, which is more “configurable” and “capable”. Startup San Francisco AI has no product or revenues, but many former TOP OPENAI researchers and apparently collect a huge round worth $ 2 billion for a quote of $ 10 billion, minimum.
Aravind Srinivas – embarrassment
Aravind Srinivas worked as a scientist at Openai for a year to 2022, when he left the company to co -founder for AI search engines. His startup attracted a number of high -profile investors, such as Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, although this also causes controversy regarding the alleged unethical scraping of the parties. Tempting, based in San Francisco, is currently collecting around $ 1 billion with a valuation of $ 18 billion from March 2025.
Kyle Kosic – XAI
Kyle Kosic left Opeli in 2023 to become a co -founder and infrastructure leading XAI, Startup Elona Muska, who offers a competing Chatbot, Grok. However, in 2024 he He jumped back back to OpenAi. XAI based in Palo Alto recently purchased X, earlier Twitter, and gave a combined valuation unit of $ 113 billion. The All-Stock transaction has raised the eyebrows, but it is a good opportunity if you put musk on the Empire.
Emmett Shear – STEM AI
Emmett Shear is the former general director of Twitch, who was the fleeting director of Openai in November 2023 for several days before the Altman himself joined the company. Shear is working on his own insidious startup, entitled STEM AI, TechCrunch revealed in 2024. Although so far there are few details about his activity and collecting funds, it has already attracted funds from Andreessen Horowitz.
Andrej Karpathy – Eureka Labs
Expert Computer Vision, Andrej Karpathy, was a member of the founder and scientist at Openai, leaving a startup to Tesla in 2017 to run his autopilot program. Carpathy is also known from his YouTube films Explanation of the basic concepts of AI. He left Tesla in 2024 to set up his own startup of education technology, Eureka Labs, Startup based in San Francisco, which builds AI didactic assistants.
Jeff Arnold – Pilot
Jeff Arnold worked as the head of the Openai operation for five months in 2016, before the co -founder of the accounting startup based in San Francisco in 2017, a pilot, who initially focused on settling startups, recently collected $ 100 million in series C in 2021 with a valuation of $ 1.2 billion and attracted investors such as Jeff Bezos. Arnold worked as a COO pilot departure in 2024 to launch the VC fund.
David Luan – Adept AI Labs
David Luan was the Vice President of Openai’s engineering until he left in 2020 after a passage on Google, in 2021 co -founder of the AI Labs adept, a startup that builds AI tools for employees. The startup recently raised $ 350 million for a north valuation of $ 1 billion in 2023, but Luan left at the end of 2024 to supervise the AI Amazon Ai laboratory after Amazon hired the founders of the adept.
Tim Shi – Cresta
Tim Shi was an early member of the Openai team, where he focused on building a safe and sound artificial general intelligence (Agi), according to his LinkedIn profile. He worked at OPENAI for a year in 2017, but he went to Cresta, AI Contact contact startup based in San Francisco, which collected over 270 million dollars with VC, such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and others, according to A, according to A press release.
Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen and Rocky Duan – Cowariant
The trio worked all in Openai in 2016 and 2017 as scientific scientists before establishing Covariant, Berkeley startup, California, which builds AI models for robots. In 2024, Amazon employed all three founders of Covariant and about a quarter of the staff. Quasi’s acquisition was viewed by some As part of a wider trend of great technology trying to avoid antitrust control.
Maddie Hall – Living Carbon
Maddie Hall worked on “special projects” at Openai, but in 2019 to co -be co -founded Living Carbon, a startup from San Francisco, which aims to create designed plants that can suck more coal from the sky to combat climate change. Living Carbon raised a round of $ 21 million in 2023, according to complete financing up to $ 36 million press release.
Sharma Hashme – Prosper Robotics
Shariq Hashme worked for OpenAI for 9 months in 2017 in a bot that could play the popular Dota video game according to its LinkedIn profile. After a few years in the field of AI start-ups, a co-founder in London in London Prosper Robotics in 2021. Startup claims that he is working on a robot for people’s homes, a scorching trend of robotics, which other players also work on, such as other players 1x and Texas in Texas.
Jonas Schneider – Daedalus
Jonas Schneider conducted the OPENAI software engineering for the Robotyki team, but in 2019 he went to the co -founder of Daedalus in 2019, who builds advanced factories for precise components. The startup from San Francisco raised a series of $ 21 million with support from Khosl Ventures last year.
Margaret Jennings – Kindo
Margaret Jennings worked at OPENAI in 2022 and 2023 until she went to co -founder Kindo, who sells as chatbot AI for enterprises. Kindo collected over $ 27 million for funds, the last raising According to her profile, LinkedIn in 2024 Jennings left Kindo in 2024 in 2024 to spread the product and research on the French startup AI Mistral.