PALO ALTO — AI platform Chai announced it has closed a strategic investment with CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider of large-scale GPU-accelerated workloads.
The deal caps Chai’s valuation at $450 million and follows several months on from Chai’s pre-seed round in which it raised $2 million to further the company’s mission of creating a more open and democratic AI platform.
CoreWeave’s strategic investment in Chai will go towards powering one of the first large-scale AI language model competitions, where competitors submit language models to compete for user engagement in Chai’s popular entertainment app. Winners in the competition are rewarded with cash prizes and the prestige of the title.
Chai has also deployed its service on top of CoreWeave’s infrastructure, meaning every message sent on the platform goes through CoreWeave’s cloud.
“CoreWeave has the best insight into the inner workings of our business out of everyone”, said Chai CEO William Beauchamp. “As our user base continues to grow, so will our demand for CoreWeave’s infrastructure offerings”.
Chai said it is competing with Open AI and other deep-pocketed companies for top talent in the AI field. Chai says it is paying software engineers total compensation up to $875,000 including $400,000 base salary and $475,000 in company equity.
