Reflection AI, backed by Nvidia and valued at up to $25 billion, is betting big on open-weight AI to counter foreign rivals, before even shipping its first model.
Founded in March 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, Reflection AI has rapidly established one of the largest war chests in the artificial intelligence sector. In October 2025, the company secured US$2 billion in a funding round led by Nvidia with an US$800 million contribution, valuing the startup at $8 billion.
Its prominent investor base features Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DST Global, 1789 Capital, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. By mid-2026, ongoing funding discussions elevated Reflection AI’s implied valuation into the US$20 billion to US$25 billion range.
To power its ambitious development roadmap, the company executed a landmark multi-year compute contract with SpaceX valued at up to US$6.3 billion. Beginning July 2026, Reflection AI will pay US$150 million monthly to access high-density Nvidia GB300 graphics processing units hosted at SpaceX’s Colossus 2 facility through 2029.
Despite amassing billions in capital and infrastructure, Reflection AI has yet to publicly release a single foundation model or weights checkpoint as of mid-2026. Initially focused on autonomous coding agents, the firm pivoted toward open-weight models tailored for enterprise integration and government defense contracts.
Reflection AI positions itself directly as a Western, US-backed open-source counterweight to Chinese open-source initiatives like DeepSeek, aiming to retain frontier AI capabilities and critical intellectual property within the United States.
