Open frontier models · San Francisco, US · founded 2023
Essential AI: who founded it, who funds it
Essential AI is a San Francisco open-weight AI lab founded in 2023 by Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, who came from DeepMind. What it is building: open platform and Rnj-1 models from two Transformer authors; the technical team was acqui-hired by Nvidia in June 2026. It has raised $231.5M in disclosed rounds, most recently a Series B of $175M at a $1B valuation in August 2025. Acqui-hired by Nvidia for Nemotron, June 2026.
- Founders
- Ashish Vaswani (ex-Google DeepMind), Niki Parmar (ex-Google DeepMind)
- Founders from
- ex-Google DeepMind
- Location
- San Francisco, US (North America)
- Valuation
- $1B set by the last priced round
- Raised
- $231.5M disclosed
- Investors
- March Capital lead, Thrive Capital, Google, AMD
- What ships
- Acquired
- Notes
- Acqui-hired by Nvidia for Nemotron, June 2026.
Rounds
| Date | Round | Amount | Valuation | Lead | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 15, 2025 | Series B | $175M | $1B | · | valueaddvc.com |
| Dec 12, 2023 | Series A | $56.5M | · | March Capital | financialpost.com |
Sources
- Acqui-hire groundlevel-ai.com
News
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Sep 9, 2026
-
Jul 20, 2026
+1 more coverage
- GovTech Residents Look to Governments for Essential AI Skills
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Jul 7, 2026
- Jun 23, 2026
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Jun 20, 2026
Investors who back other labs here
- AMD also: Thinking Machines Lab, Hark, World Labs, Recursive Superintelligence
- Google also: Safe Superintelligence, Ineffable Intelligence, Sakana AI, Isomorphic Labs
- Thrive Capital also: Physical Intelligence, Chai Discovery, Isomorphic Labs
Same research area
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- Prime Intellect $1B · San Francisco, US
- DeepSeek $52B · Hangzhou, CN
- Mistral AI $14B · Paris, FR