OpenAI Mafia: The Rise of Silicon Valley’s New Tech Giants
Move over, PayPal mafia: There’s a new tech mafia in Silicon Valley. As the startup behind ChatGPT, OpenAI is arguably the biggest AI player in town. Its meteoric rise to a $300 billion valuation has spurred many employees to leave the AI giant to create startups of their own.
The hype around OpenAI is so high that some of these startups, like Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, have been able to raise billions of dollars without even launching a product.
But there are lots of other startups in the OpenAI mafia ecosystem. These range from AI search giant Perplexity to xAI, the new owner of X (formerly Twitter.) There’s also smaller outfits with some futuristic plans, like Living Carbon, which is creating plants that suck more carbon out of the atmosphere, or Prosper Robotics, which is building a robot butler.
Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and John Schulman — Anthropic
Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI in 2021 to form their own startup, San Francisco-based Anthropic, that has long touted a focus on AI safety. Later, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman joined Anthropic in 2024, pledging to build a “safe AGI.” OpenAI reportedly remains multiple times larger than Anthropic by revenue ($3.7 billion compared to $1 billion for 2024, The Information reported). But Anthropic has quickly grown to become OpenAI’s biggest rival and was valued at $61.5 billion in March 2025.
Ilya Sutskever — Safe Superintelligence
OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI in May 2024 after he was reportedly part of a failed effort to replace CEO Sam Altman. Shortly afterward, he co-founded Safe Superintelligence, or SSI, with “one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence,” he says. Details about what exactly the startup is up to are scant: It has no product and no revenue yet. But investors are clamoring for a piece anyway, and it’s been able to raise $2 billion, with its latest valuation reportedly rising to $32 billion this month. SSI is based in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel.
Mira Murati — Thinking Machines Lab
Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO, left OpenAI last year to found her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, which emerged from stealth in February 2025, announcing (rather vaguely) that it will build AI that’s more “customizable” and “capable.” The San Francisco AI startup has no product or revenue but plenty of former top OpenAI researchers and is reportedly in the process of raising a massive $2 billion seed round valuing it at $10 billion, minimum.
Aravind Srinivas — Perplexity
Aravind Srinivas worked as a research scientist 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 like Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, although it’s also caused controversy over alleged unethical web scraping. Perplexity, which is based in San Francisco, is currently raising about $1 billion at an $18 billion valuation as of March 2025.
Kyle Kosic — xAI
Kyle Kosic left OpenAI in 2023 to become a co-founder and infrastructure lead of xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup that offers a rival chatbot, Grok. In 2024, however, he hopped back to OpenAI. Palo Alto-based xAI recently acquired X, formerly Twitter, and gave the combined entity a valuation of $113 billion. The all-stock transaction raised some eyebrows but is a good deal if you’re betting on Musk’s empire.
Emmett Shear — Stem AI
Emmett Shear is the former CEO of Twitch who was OpenAI’s interim CEO in November 2023 for a few days before Sam Altman rejoined the company. Shear is working on his own stealth startup, called Stem AI, JS revealed in 2024. Although there are few details about its activity and fundraising so far, it has already attracted funding from Andreessen Horowitz.
Andrej Karpathy — Eureka Labs
Computer vision expert Andrej Karpathy was a founding member and research scientist at OpenAI, leaving the startup to join Tesla in 2017 to lead its autopilot program. Karpathy is also well-known for his YouTube videos explaining core AI concepts. He left Tesla in 2024 to found his own education technology startup, Eureka Labs, a San Francisco-based startup that is building AI teaching assistants.
Jeff Arnold — Pilot
Jeff Arnold worked as OpenAI’s head of operations for five months in 2016 before co-founding San Francisco-based accounting startup Pilot in 2017. Pilot, which focused initially on doing accounting for startups, last raised a $100 million Series C in 2021 at a $1.2 billion valuation and has attracted investors like Jeff Bezos. Arnold worked as Pilot’s COO until leaving in 2024 to launch a VC fund.
David Luan — Adept AI Labs
David Luan was OpenAI’s engineering VP until he left in 2020. After a stint at Google, in 2021 he co-founded Adept AI Labs, a startup that builds AI tools for employees. The startup last raised $350 million at a valuation north of $1 billion in 2023, but Luan left in late 2024 to oversee Amazon’s AI agents lab after Amazon hired Adept’s founders.
Tim Shi — Cresta
Tim Shi was an early member of OpenAI’s team, where he focused on building safe artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to his LinkedIn profile. 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 over $270 million from VCs like Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, and Rocky Duan — Covariant
The trio all worked at OpenAI in 2016 and 2017 as research scientists before founding Covariant, a Berkeley, California-based startup that builds foundation AI models for robots. In 2024, Amazon hired all three of the Covariant founders and about a quarter of its staff. The quasi acquisition was viewed by some as part of a broader trend of Big Tech attempting to avoid antitrust scrutiny.
Maddie Hall — Living Carbon
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 out of the sky to fight climate change. Living Carbon raised a $21 million Series A round in 2023, bringing its total funding until then to $36 million.
Shariq Hashme — Prosper Robotics
Shariq Hashme worked for OpenAI for 9 months in 2017 on a bot that could play the popular video game Dota, per his LinkedIn profile. After a few years at data-labeling startup Scale AI, he co-founded London-based Prosper Robotics in 2021. The startup says it’s working on a robot butler for people’s homes, a hot trend in robotics that other players like Norway’s 1X and Texas-based Apptronik are also working on.
Jonas Schneider — Daedalus
Jonas Schneider led OpenAI’s software engineering for robotics team but left in 2019 to co-found Daedalus, which builds advanced factories for precision components. The San Francisco-based startup raised a $21 million Series A last year with backing from Khosla Ventures, among others.
Margaret Jennings — Kindo
Margaret Jennings worked at OpenAI in 2022 and 2023 until she left to co-found Kindo, which markets itself as an AI chatbot for enterprises. Kindo has raised over $27 million in funding, last raising a $20.6 million Series A in 2024. Jennings left Kindo in 2024 to head product and research at French AI startup Mistral.
