VENTURE
DAILY
CAPITAL
COVER
AI Research Lab Imbue
Nabs $200 Million For
Speculative Bet To Build AI
‘Agents’
Imbue cofounders Josh Albrecht and Kanjun Qiu. KELLY NYLAND
Sep 7, 2023, 10:00am EDT
The startup, one of very few woman-led AI
unicorns, has a $1 billion valuation and access
to 10,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, but its founders
say it could be years away from revealing a
product.
by Alex Konrad, Forbes Staff and Kenrick Cai, Forbes Staff
I
t was at a San Francisco party hosted by Greg
Brockman nearly a decade ago — around the
time the Stripe CTO would leave to co-found
an AI research lab called OpenAI — that
entrepreneurs Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht
met a crypto mogul named Jed McCaleb.
As Qiu and Albrecht launched two now-defunct
startups, and McCaleb became a regular at The
Archive, their group house for founders and AI
researchers near Dolores Park, they talked
periodically about launching their own AI lab.
Several of their housemates had joined
Brockman and Sam Altman’s OpenAI project.
Still, it felt too early, “a little too crazy,” to just
walk away from what they’d built, Qiu said. But
when their second startup, Sourceress, stopped
growing fast enough, they reconsidered. And
when the duo raised $20 million for a new AI
research company, Generally Intelligent, last
year, McCaleb wrote the biggest check.
Now, Qiu and Albrecht are doubling down on
their lab under a new name, Imbue — and this
time, McCaleb, a billionaire after cofounding
crypto startup Ripple, is writing an even bigger
check. Imbue has announced that the Astera
Institute, his nonprofit dedicated to backing
science and tech projects, is leading a $200
million Series B funding round in the startup.
The all-cash round, which includes AI
chipmaking heavyweight Nvidia, Cruise
cofounder Kyle Vogt and Notion cofounder
Simon Last, values Imbue at more than $1
billion, making the company one of the only
woman-led AI research unicorns.
While OpenAI and rivals from Anthropic to
Google battle to build massive AI foundation
models like GPT-4, Qiu and Albrecht are
charting a different course. Imbue’s focus is an
AI “agent”: a type of computing system that can
simulate human decision-making to complete
complex tasks. Chatbots like ChatGPT receive a
user’s query and generate a near-instant
response. Imbue’s agents would act more like a
virtual research assistant that can crunch
analysis, recommend follow-on experiments and
even set them up, all unsupervised.
Such self-sufficiency could be helpful in a wide
range of situations, from biology research to
travel planning and complex coding projects,
according to Albrecht. Agents “go off on their
own and do stuff,” Qiu explained.
“We believe AI has
the potential to thin
the barrier between
ideas and
execution.”
To build such agents, Imbue has amassed access
to 10,000 of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs —about the
same number of processors that OpenAI used to
train GPT-3. It released an open-source training
environment for teaching such tools, called
Avalon, last fall; more prototypes and releases
are coming, its founders said, in the months
ahead.
Imbue is also breathtakingly early in its journey
to be joining the billion-dollar-startup ranks.
The startup employs only about 20 people. No
demo of their agents is ready for public
consumption yet, its founders said. And its lead
backer, McCaleb’s Astera, is an unusual source
compared to the name-brand venture capital
firms and Big Tech cloud providers that have
swarmed other recent AI projects — in part, Qiu
and Albrecht claim, because a non-profit can be
more patient with their commercialization
timeline. (McCaleb tells Forbes that he is still
looking for “venture-style” financial returns in
the long run.)
In the frothy AI market, a startup raising
hundreds of millions without any revenue isn’t
unheard-of. But it’s a stakes-raising bet that puts
much more scrutiny on what Imbue does next.
For Qiu, that goal is a lofty one: build for AI
agents what the Xerox PARC lab was for the
personal computer half a century ago.
Back then, computers were expensive and
byzantine to use, but PARC researchers had
developed tools that made them accessible to
non-technical people and those tools ultimately
put PCs in our homes. Imbue wants to do the
same for generative AI. “We believe AI has the
potential to thin the barrier between ideas and
execution,” Qiu said. “A truly personal computer
that does things for you, and frees people up.”
I
mbue’s founders first met at a conference at
UC Berkeley in 2014. Qiu worked at
Dropbox, where she started in business
operations before becoming the first chief of staff
to CEO Drew Houston. Albrecht had been a
cofounder and chief technology officer at several
startups before joining the data team at wealth
manager Addepar. Both had studied machine
learning in college, Albrecht co-publishing
papers at the University of Pittsburgh, Qiu
working on probability theory while building and
running high-frequency trade algorithms to help
pay her way through MIT.
They bonded over high-brow topics such as the
future of humans’ decision-making powers in an
AI-dominated world. Soon, Albrecht convinced
Qiu to team up on Ember Hardware, his startup
project building virtual reality hardware, but the
company never got off the ground. After setting
up The Archive house, which would become
home to many early OpenAI researchers, the
pair decided to use machine learning to solve a
problem they’d experienced at now-defunct
Ember: inspiring talented people who aren't
looking for a job to apply for one anyway. Called
Sourceress, their startup went through startup
accelerator Y Combinator in 2017; Houston and
his Dropbox cofounder Arash Ferdowsi invested
as Sourceress raised a $3.5 million seed round
upon completing the program.
“Every decade or so
there’s a new era of
computing that kicks
off, and everybody’s
fumbling around
together.”
The company did decent business for a time,
reaching millions in sales, before growth slowed.
When several attempts to jumpstart momentum
failed, the founders and Threshold investor Josh
Stein had a “mature conversation” about
pivoting to another, potentially bigger idea.
“There was nothing wrong with Sourceress per
se, but it was clear it wasn’t going to be a
breakout success,” said Stein.
In late 2020, Qiu and Albrecht shut down
Sourceress, returning about $4 million to
investors and invited those that were interested
to roll over some of their investment into equity
stakes in the duo’s new startup, Generally
Intelligent. On paper, those stakes appear
lucrative given Imbue’s latest valuation: “It looks
like it’s going to be a very successful investment
for us,” Stein said.
I
t’s a pleasant August evening in San
Francisco as Houston takes the mic to talk
about all things AI with Qiu and Ali Rohde,
who manages a small venture fund Imbue’s
founders established to back other early-stage AI
startups. Several dozen attendees, mostly
entrepreneurs and engineers, flock to
productivity software company Notion’s
minimalistic Mission District office to hear
Houston speak.
The gathering, one of a weekly series, is
reminiscent of The Archive’s old dinners, but at a
larger scale. “Every decade or so there’s a new
era of computing that kicks off, and everybody’s
fumbling around together,” Houston said later.
“To be in that community, it’s exciting.”
Houston didn’t expect his former employee to
pivot from recruiting automation to AI research
lab; now, given the recent excitement around
generative AI, he said the move has gone from
looking like “science project” to “right in the
fairway.” He’s joined by a who’s who of backers
in that fund, Outset Capital, including Quora
CEO and OpenAI board member Adam
D’Angelo, Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg
and Google DeepMind head of policy (and
former Dropbox PR chief) Dorothy Chou.
“We could either
keep researching
along, while all these
other labs were
making a lot of
progress, or we
could make a bet
here, and go for it.”
Despite their deep Silicon Valley connections,
several prolific investors in the category – all of
whom asked to remain anonymous to speak
freely – said they doubted the team’s credentials
to operate a serious AI research lab. Others
disagree. One, who knows Imbue’s founders,
discounted such concerns as VC bias to collect
“baseball cards,” or only back founders from the
same several prestigious backgrounds. Still, they
wondered whether Imbue’s ambition to release
agents as commercial projects would
differentiate it from other well-resourced labs
over the long run.
Qiu and Albrecht are unperturbed by any
concerns about their team’s research chops.
They pointed to a handful of employees with
academic backgrounds in AI research, as well as
neuroscience and plasma physics, arguing their
breadth is a strength.
Imbue’s lack of traditional investors on its cap
table (Stein’s Threshold is the only one) has also
raised questions. The founders say they
deliberately didn’t take any formal meetings with
venture capital firms for Imbue’s recent fund
raises, in large part because they acknowledge
their work could take years to develop proven
commercial projects. “I think it’s actually
beneficial to be a little bit of an outsider, to take
a fresh look,” their investor, McCaleb, agreed.
As for Imbue’s eye-popping valuation for such a
fledgling project, McCaleb said he was satisfied
with the scope of the opportunity after seeing a
demo that showed how Qiu and Albrecht might
eventually build agents; it went against “99% of
the [research] efforts” he was seeing at other AI
labs. (Qiu and Albrecht said they could not share
that demo publicly yet).
“In order to actually push this research to the
next level and see if we can build it and then
later productize it, you need a bunch of money,
because you need GPUs, right?” McCaleb said.
“We could either keep researching along, while
all these other labs were making a lot of
progress, or we could make a bet here, and go for
it. So, it just seemed like the time to do that.”
Imbue may well have its own public-facing “aha”
moment someday, as OpenAI did with the
popular launch of ChatGPT. These things take
time. Qiu and Albrecht pointed to Cruise, the
self-driving car business whose cofounder is now
an investor, and how early excitement about
demos are only leading to more adoption now, a
decade later. Mainstreaming agents like Imbue
likely won’t take a decade, Albrecht claimed; but
it won’t take a matter of months, either.
“We will be actively exploring,” Albrecht said.
“We want to wait until we are ready and think,
this is really good, we trust it and it’s robust, safe
and great, before we put it out there.”
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