Move over, PayPal mafia: There’s a recent tech mafia in Silicon Valley. OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, is arguably the biggest AI player in town. According to reports, the company is currently in talks to complete a $100 billion deal valuing it at over $850 billion.
Many employees have come and gone since the company’s inception a decade ago, and some have started their own startups. Some of them have become top contenders (like Anthropic), while others, thanks to investor interest alone, have managed to raise billions without even releasing a product to market (see Thinking Machines Lab).
In January, Aliisa Rosenthal, OpenAI’s first sales leader, talked a little about this growing network. She, like other OpenAI graduates who did not become founders, decided to become an investor and said she intended to tap into the network of former OpenAI founders to look for deal flow. We know that Peter Deng, former head of OpenAI consumer products (and now general partner at Felicis) has already done this.
Below is a list of the major startups founded by OpenAI graduates, in alphabetical order. We are sure that this list will grow over time.
David Luan – AI Adept Labs
David Luan was OpenAI’s vice president of engineering until he left in 2020. After working at Google, in 2021 he co-founded Adept AI Labs, a startup that creates AI tools for employees. The startup last raised $350 million at a valuation of around $1 billion in 2023, but Luan left in behind schedule 2024 to oversee Amazon’s AI agent lab after Amazon hired Adept’s founders.
Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei and John Schulman – Anthropic
Siblings Dario and Daniel Amodea left OpenAI in 2021 to found their own startup, San Francisco-based Anthropic, which has long advertised focusing on AI security. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman joined Anthropic in 2024 with a commitment to build a “secure AGI.” The company has since become OpenAI’s biggest rival and just raised $30 billion in Series G, earning a $380 billion valuation in the process. There are also rumors of an IPO, as the company is reportedly preparing for a public listing, which could happen later this year. (OpenAI is also allegedly preparing for an IPO this year, and it is happening maybe I’ll even try to beat Anthropic to the public market.)
Rhythm Garg, Linden Li and Yash Patil – Applied calculations
Three former OpenAI employees (Rhythm Garg, Linden Li and Yash Patil) have reportedly raised $20 million for a startup called Applied Compute as reported by Upstarts Media. All three worked as technical staff at OpenAI for more than a year before leaving the company last May to launch the startup, according to their LinkedIns. The startup helps enterprises train and deploy custom AI agents. Benchmark led the round, valuing the 10-month-old company at $100 million, Upstarts Media said.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 9, 2026
Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen and Rocky Duan – covariant
The three worked at OpenAI in 2016 and 2017 as research scientists before founding Covariant, a Berkeley, California-based startup that creates basic artificial intelligence models for robots. In 2024, Amazon hired all three of Covariant’s founders and about a quarter of its staff. There was a quasi-takeover watched by some as part of a broader trend of Large Tech trying to avoid antitrust scrutiny.
Tim Shi – Cresta
Tim Shi was an early member of the OpenAI team, where, according to his LinkedIn profile, he focused on building secure artificial general intelligence (AGI). He worked at OpenAI for a year in 2017, but left to found Cresta, a San Francisco-based AI contact center startup that has raised more than $270 million from VCs like Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and others, according to a study press release.
Jonas Schneider – Daedalus
Jonas Schneider led the OpenAI software engineering team for robotics, but left in 2019 to co-found Daedalus, which builds advanced precision component factories. The San Francisco-based startup raised $21 million in Series A funding last year, including with support from Khosla Ventures.
Andrej Karpathy – Eureka Labs
Computer vision expert Andrej Karpathy was a founding member and researcher of OpenAI, leaving the startup to join Tesla in 2017 to lead its autopilot program. Karpathy is also well known for his YouTube movies explaining the basic concepts of artificial intelligence. He left Tesla in 2024 to found his own educational technology startup, Eureka Labs, a San Francisco-based startup that creates AI teaching assistants.
Margaret Jennings – A little
Margaret Jennings worked at OpenAI in 2022 and 2023 until she left to become the co-founder of Kindo, which bills itself as an AI chatbot for enterprises. Kindo has raised more than $27 million, last raising a $20.6 million Series A in 2024. Jennings left Kindo in 2024 to lead product and research at French artificial intelligence startup Mistral, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Maddie Hall – Living Coal
Maddie Hall worked on “special projects” at OpenAI, but left in 2019 to co-found Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based startup that aims to create engineered plants that can suck more carbon dioxide from the sky to fight climate change. According to research, Living Carbon raised $21 million in Series A in 2023, bringing its total funding by then to $36 million press release.
Liam Fedus – Periodic laboratories
Liam Fedus, OpenAI’s vice president of post-training research, left the company in March 2025 to join forces with his former Google Brain colleague Ekin Dogus Cubuk to launch Periodic Labs. The startup seeks to leverage artificial intelligence scientists to find recent materials, particularly recent superconducting materials. It emerged from stealth mode in September 2025 armed with a massive $300 million in seed funding backed by Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Felicis and Andreessen Horowitz.
Aravind Srinivas – Embarrassment
Aravind Srinivas worked as a research associate at OpenAI for a year until 2022, when he left the company to co-found AI search engine Perplexity. His startup has attracted a string of high-profile investors such as Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, although it has also sparked controversy over alleged unethical internet scraping. San Francisco-based Perplexity recently reported a $200 million raise at a $20 billion valuation.
Jeff Arnold – pilot
Jeff Arnold worked as OpenAI’s COO for five months in 2016 and then co-founded the San Francisco-based accounting startup Pilot in 2017. Pilot, which initially focused on accounting for startups, recently raised $100 million in Series C funding in 2021 at a $1.2 billion valuation and attracted investors like Jeff Bezos. Arnold previously worked as Pilot’s director of operations departure launch a VC fund in 2024.
Shariq Hashme – Prosper Robotics
According to his LinkedIn profile, in 2017 Shariq Hashme worked for 9 months for OpenAI on a bot that could play the popular video game Dota. After several years of working at the data labeling startup Scale AI, in 2021 he co-founded the London-based company Prosper Robotics. The startup says it is working on a robotic butler for people’s homes – a heated trend in robotics that other players like Norway’s 1X and Texas-based Apptronik are also working on.
Ilia Sutskever – Secure Superintelligence
OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI in May 2024 after reportedly being involved in an unsuccessful attempt to replace CEO Sam Altman. Shortly thereafter, he co-founded Unthreatening Superintelligence, or SSI, with “one goal and one product: safe superintelligence,” he says. Details about what exactly the startup does are meager: it doesn’t have a product or revenue yet. But investors are clamoring for that piece anyway, and it has managed to raise $2 billion, with its latest valuation reportedly rising to $32 billion this month. SSI is headquartered in Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel.
Emmett Shear – AI stalk
Emmett Shear is the former CEO of Twitch who served as interim CEO of OpenAI for a few days in November 2023 before Sam Altman rejoined the company. In 2024, Shear founded the artificial intelligence company StemAI (though it appears to have since changed its name to Softmax). The company, which appears to be focused on research, has raised funding from Andreessen Horowitz.
Mira Murati – Thinking Machines Laboratory
Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO, left OpenAI to start her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, which came out of stealth in February 2025. At the time, it said (rather vaguely) that it would build artificial intelligence that was more “customizable” and “possible.” The San Francisco-based AI startup, now valued at $12 billion, announced its first product behind schedule last year: an API that tunes language models. It recently made headlines when two of its co-founders announced earlier this year that they would be returning to OpenAI.
Kyle Kosic – xAI
Kyle Kosic left OpenAI in 2023 to become co-founder and infrastructure leader of xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup that offers the rival Grok chatbot. However, in 2024 he jumped back to OpenAI, where it remains. Meanwhile, xAI (which acquired Musk’s social networking site X) was purchased by Musk’s SpaceX, giving the combined company a valuation of $1.25 trillion. The company plans to go public in June and it will be a historic entry.
Angela Jiang – Worktrace Artificial Intelligence
Angela Jiang left OpenAI in 2024 after working as a product manager and public policy team. In April 2025 Worktrace was quietly launchedthat uses artificial intelligence to facilitate businesses increase the efficiency of business operations. According to the company’s website, it observes employee work patterns and automates workflows. The business is backed by Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI, who went on to launch Thinking Machines Lab. It is also backed by OpenAI’s startup fund, as well as many other OpenAI names such as Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon.
Hidden startups
In addition to these startups, many other former OpenAI employees have founded startups that are still operating in stealth mode, according to various updates found by TechCrunch on LinkedIn. For example, former OpenAI researcher Danilo Hellermark appears to have been working on a generative AI startup for the past few years. He officially left OpenAI in early 2023. Is also one apparently in the works with Lucas Negrito, who worked in the OpenAI technical team and left the company in 2023 after three years. Since then, he has founded one startup, and since August 2025 – according to his LinkedIn – he has been working on another one.