Robinhood CEO’s AI maths start-up valued at US$875 million, just shy of unicorn status
Harmonic adopts a maths-first approach, which it hopes will make its model better at solving complicated problems than large language models
The series B funding round was led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures and Paradigm. The deal valued the AI start-up at US$875 million, said Tenev, who serves as the company’s executive chairman, a non-operating role.
Harmonic’s CEO is Tudor Achim, who previously led autonomous driving start-up Helm.ai.
Founded in 2023 by Tenev and Achim, the Palo Alto, California-based start-up aims to build AI systems that can solve complex maths problems, creating what the company refers to as mathematical superintelligence.
Harmonic plans to make its flagship AI model, Aristotle, available to researchers and the general public later this year.
“The near-term goal is to build an AI that solves maths problems at a level that is superior to any human,” Tenev said. “The ultimate goal would be to solve major unsolved mathematical problems and expand that to problems in physics and computer science.”