Die ehemaligen Angestellten, die OpenAI verlassen haben, haben bereits sieben Unicorn-Unternehmen geschaffen.

There has emerged a new group of large - scale enterprises among AI entrepreneurs, this time from the well - known American artificial intelligence company OpenAI, the developer of the globally popular ChatGPT.

The company was founded at the end of 2015 and is dedicated to the research of artificial intelligence technologies. Initially, it was conceived as a non - profit organization. Only on March 1, 2019, did it found its subsidiary OpenAI LP and transform into a profit - oriented organization. Later, it received support from Microsoft and many top venture capitalists and developed into a super - unicorn.

As prominent as its flagship product ChatGPT are also the unrest in the upper management and the restructuring of the technical team at OpenAI.

ChatGPT can tell this story wonderfully. Therefore, we will not go into further details.

IT Juzi has found that the former core members (mainly management) who have left OpenAI have already founded several AI companies. Surprisingly, there are at least 7, all of which have become unicorn companies.

Companies such as Anthropic, Perplexity, and SSI have repeatedly received financings in the billions of dollars, and their company values have skyrocketed.

These companies focus on areas such as AI security, education, and search. Some are direct competitors of OpenAI, while others promote the diverse application of the technology, thus showing the impact of OpenAI's human resource spread on the industry.

IT Juzi will introduce the situation of 7 of these unicorn companies as follows:

1. Thinking Machines Lab, which became a unicorn in the year of its founding

The founder of Thinking Machines Lab is the former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, Mira Murati.

She was born in Albania in 1988, moved to Canada at the age of 16, and graduated from Dartmouth College in the United States with a degree in mechanical engineering in 2012. She worked as an intern analyst at Goldman Sachs, as a leading concept engineer at the French aerospace company Zodiac Aerospace, and was also the leading product manager for the Tesla Model X and led the development of the driver - assistance software Autopilot.

After joining OpenAI in 2018, she steadily advanced and led the development of products such as ChatGPT, DALL - E, Codex, and GPT - 4. She is referred to as the "mother of ChatGPT". In 2022, she was appointed Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI and left the company in February 2025 to start her own business.

Her team currently consists of about 30 people, two - thirds of whom come from OpenAI, including co - founder John Schulman and former research director Barret Zoph.

Thinking Machines Lab is dedicated to the development of artificial intelligence models and products that support "human - AI collaboration". In June 2025, the company completed a $2 - billion seed financing, led by a16z, in which Nvidia, AMD, Accel, and others also participated. The company value is estimated to be about $12 billion.

2. Anthropic, which has the highest company value and directly competes with OpenAI

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI researchers and engineers. The core team left OpenAI due to differences in opinions regarding the direction of AI security and ethics.

Dario Amodei is the Chief Executive Officer. He was previously the research director at OpenAI and participated in the development of GPT - 2 and GPT - 3. His sister Daniela Amodei is the president. She was previously the director of security and policy at OpenAI and now focuses on aligning Anthropic's business goals with its social mission.

Anthropic is registered as a "Public Benefit Corporation" (PBC) and is dedicated to the development of reliable, interpretable, and controllable artificial intelligence systems, with particular emphasis on the alignment of AI security with human values.

Anthropic's flagship product is the Claude series of Large Language Models (LLM), which aims to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT. The company offers Claude services to enterprises via APIs and cloud platforms (such as AWS Bedrock and Google Clouds Vertex AI), which are used in areas such as customer support, coding tools, search, and research.

Source: Claude - Client

After completing a $3.5 - billion Series E financing in March 2025, Anthropic's cumulative financing amounted to $18.2 billion, and its company value is $61.5 billion ; the main investors are Google and Amazon. The financing is used for the further development of next - generation AI systems, the expansion of computing capacity, and international expansion.

In July of this year, it was reported that Anthropic is about to complete a new financing in the range of $3 to $5 billion, led by Iconiq Capital. After this financing, its company value could reach up to $170 billion.

3. Safe Superintelligence (SSI), which has no product yet but is currently very popular

Ilya Sutskever, the former co - founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, founded SSI in June 2024. The co - founders are also Daniel Gross, the former head of the AI department at Apple, and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher.

Right after its founding, SSI received a $1 - billion financing, and its company value was estimated at $5 billion. The investors are top venture capitalists such as a16z and Sequoia Capital.

In April 2025, SSI completed a $2 - billion financing with a company value of $32 billion, led by Greenoaks, in which Alphabet (Google's parent company), NVIDIA, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DST Global, and others also participated.

With the rapid development of AI technology, the public's and regulatory authorities' concerns about the potential risks of AI (such as uncontrollability or conflicts with human interests) are growing. SSI aims for "safe superintelligence", which meets the urgent market demand for safe and ethical AI. Coupled with the background of the founding team, it has won the support of top venture capitalists and is therefore very popular. Within a year after its founding, it has already reached a "top - tier company value".

Currently, there are two main points of contention around SSI:

Firstly, the controversy over the high company value. Although SSI has only about 20 employees and no revenues or products, its company value is estimated at $32 billion, which raises some doubts. On platforms such as Reddit and Hacker News, some users express their surprise at this "high company value without a product" and believe that the company value is more based on hype and Sutskever's personal reputation than on actual results.

Secondly, the opacity of the actual progress. SSI has not published any technical or product details so far. On its website, there is only a simple company mission statement, without a specific roadmap. This secrecy makes some people doubt the feasibility and transparency of the company.

4. Elon Musk and his founded xAI, which is active in politics and business

In 2015, Elon Musk founded OpenAI together with Sam Altman and others. In 2018, Musk broke off with OpenAI due to differences in opinions and power struggles. In 2023, he founded xAI with the goal of developing an open - source AGI that is "truth - oriented" and directly competes with OpenAI.

xAI has developed the product Grok, which competes with ChatGPT. By integrating the real - time social data stream from the platform X (formerly Twitter), Grok - 3 can capture current hot topics on X and generate answers from them.

Source: Grok - Website

However, Musk does not see xAI as a disruptor of OpenAI but wants to restore the original idea of "OpenAI". xAI pursues the strategy of "maximum open - source openness". For example, the Grok - 1 model is open - source under the Apache 2.0 license, which attracts global developers to participate in the ecosystem. This is in sharp contrast to OpenAI's recent tendency to develop more closed - source models (e.g., GPT - 4 only offers API services).

5. Perplexity, a unicorn in the AI search industry

Aravind Srinivas worked as a research engineer at OpenAI for a year and left the company in 2022. Then he founded the AI search engine provider Perplexity together with others.

Perplexity uses Large Language Models (such as GPT - 4, Claude, Llama, etc.) in combination with real - time web searches to generate precise and concise answers and provide the original sources. In addition, Perplexity has developed special search functions for the fields of finance, travel, and science.

Source: Perplexity - Website

Perplexity has attracted investors such as Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA. Its latest financing was initially about $500 million in 2025, and the company value after the financing is estimated to be about $14 billion.

According to reports, Perplexity is currently in talks with mobile device manufacturers (OEMs) to pre - install its newly developed Comet AI mobile browser on smartphones. It is also known that OpenAI is also developing its own AI agent browser, which can automatically perform complex tasks such as travel bookings and financial management.

6. Adept AI Labs, a unicorn in the agent industry that has lost its core team

David Luan worked as an engineering director at OpenAI and left the company in 2020. After a short stint at Google, he founded Adept AI Labs together with others in 2022.

Adept's core product concept is the development of an "AI teammate", which can perform tasks on existing software tools and APIs via natural language commands. This is similar to advanced Robot - Process - Automation (RPA) but is more universal and user - friendly.

Adept's flagship product is the AI assistant ACT - 1. It understands user requests via natural language and can automatically perform tasks in various applications such as browsers, recruiting software, and spreadsheets, such as automatic data organization, form filling, and information importing. This significantly improves work efficiency. ACT - 1 works in the form of an "overlay window" and operates directly on existing software without the user having to switch applications.

In 2023, Adept completed a $350 - million financing with a company value of over $1 billion. The financing was led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital, in which strategic investors such as Microsoft and NVIDIA also participated.

In June 2024, Adept's core team (including co - founders David Luan, Ashish Vaswani, and Niki Parmar) left the company and joined Amazon's AGI department. As a result, the most important technologies also flowed into Amazon.

Adept's remaining team consists of about 54 people, led by the new CEO Zach Brock (engineering director) and product director Tim Weingarten, and continues to work on the development of agent - AI products.

At the same time, Adept has adjusted its strategy. Since the further development of basic models requires huge financial resources, it decided to focus on agent - AI solutions and abandon the development of some basic models.

7. Cresta, founded by Chinese entrepreneurs

Tim Shi, the co - founder of Cresta, was one of the early members of OpenAI. According to his LinkedIn profile, he worked at OpenAI for a year in 2017 and focused on the development of safe AGI. He also worked on projects in the fields of deep learning and machine learning at companies such as DJI and Dropbox. In 2019, he joined Cresta as a co - founder and Chief Technology Officer.

Previously, Tim Shi completed his bachelor's degree at Tsinghua University in the Yao Class (as the first - born) and then completed a doctoral program in artificial intelligence at Stanford University, focusing on natural language processing and reinforcement learning.

Cresta focuses on solutions for AI contact centers and is also one of the first companies in the world to integrate Large - Language - Models (such as GPT) on a large scale into the corporate production environment.

Similar to Adept, Cresta mainly targets the corporate market, and its customers come from industries such as retail, telecommunications, and the automotive industry.

According to information, Cresta has received a total of over $270 million from top...