San Francisco-based AI research company Standard Intelligence has raised $75 million in new funding at a reported $500 million valuation, marking a significant step in its efforts to develop aligned artificial general intelligence (AGI) and advanced AI agent systems.
The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital and Spark Capital, with participation from notable investors and advisors including Milan Kovac, Stanley Druckenmiller, and Andrej Karpathy. The capital injection will support the company’s long-term research agenda focused on building scalable and safe AI systems.
Standard Intelligence is focused on developing foundation models and agentic AI systems designed to learn, reason, and perform a wide range of real-world tasks. The company emphasizes alignment research to ensure that increasingly capable AI systems remain safe, controllable, and reliable as their capabilities expand.
The newly raised funds will primarily be used to expand compute resources for large-scale model training, particularly for its FDM-1 model. The investment will also support exploratory “blue-sky” research aimed at advancing general-purpose learning systems and improving AI alignment techniques.
In addition to scaling infrastructure, the company plans to expand its engineering and research teams, hiring specialists to support its work in model development, training efficiency, and agent-based AI systems.
Standard Intelligence’s approach includes experimentation with novel training methods such as video pretraining, alongside efforts to improve how AI systems perceive, learn, and interact with complex environments.
The latest funding round reflects continued investor interest in artificial intelligence startups focused on foundational model development and next-generation agentic systems, particularly those aiming to bridge the gap between capability and safety in AGI research.
