Dutch AI Startup Secures $320 Million Investment from Jeff Bezos and Others

General Intuition, a Dutch AI startup with a presence in New York, has achieved a significant milestone, raising $320 million in a new funding round that values the company at $2.3 billion. The investment was led by U.S. tech fund Khosla Ventures and includes high-profile tech figures such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, alongside a group of Dutch AI investors.

This substantial funding and valuation are unprecedented for a young Dutch AI company. Despite its New York base and founder, the company is legally registered in the Netherlands, a fact that co-founder Pim de Witte proudly acknowledges, stating, "It still feels like we've achieved this with our little country."

De Witte, who grew up in Nijmegen, has a history of early entrepreneurship, including running a large server for the game RuneScape at age fourteen. He previously worked with Doctors Without Borders to develop software for Ebola control and founded the gaming platform Medal, where gamers share video clips of their in-game actions.

General Intuition leverages the vast amount of data from these game clips. The movements, actions, falls, and collisions captured in these videos are used to train AI models that can predict similar actions in the real world. This approach allows the company to train its models faster and more cost-effectively than competitors who rely on real-world data collection. "Where language models can predict the next word, our model predicts the next action," De Witte explained.

The company's focus on "world models", AI systems designed to predict how objects, bodies, and machines move in the physical world, is seen by many investors and tech companies as a crucial next step in AI development. If successful, this technology could enable AI not only to generate text, images, and code but also to control robots and other physical systems.

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Maar ik was er heel blij mee natuurlijk. Vooral dat we Jeff Bezos erbij kregen, vond ik cool.