PayPal Mafia: Silicon Valley has a new high-tech mafia. As the startup behind ChatGpt, Openai is undoubtedly the biggest AI player in town. The meteor rise to a $300 billion valuation has spurred many employees to leave the AI giant and create their own startups.
The hype around Openai is so high that some of these startups have been able to raise billions of dollars without launching products, like Ilya Sutskever’s safe super intelligence and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab.
However, there are many other startups in the Openai Mafia ecosystem. These range from the confusion of AI search giants to Xai, the new owner of X (formerly Twitter). There are also small outfits with several futuristic plans, such as the Living Carbon, which creates thriving robotics that are building more carbon-sucking plants from the atmosphere and building robotics butlers.
Below is a summary of the most notable startups founded by Openai Alumni.
Dario Amody, Daniela Amody, John Shulman – Humanity
Brothers Dario and Daniela Amody left the opening in 2021 and formed their own San Francisco-based startup, which has long focused on AI safety. Openai co-founder John Schulman then joined humanity in 2024 and pledged to build a “safe AGI.” Openai reportedly remains multiple times greater than human revenue ($3.7 billion compared to $1 billion in 2024). However, humanity grew rapidly and became the biggest open rival, valued at $61.5 billion in March 2025.
Ilya Sutskever – Safe Emergency Intelligence
Openai co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left Openai in May 2024 after it was reportedly part of a failed effort on behalf of CEO Sam Altman. Shortly afterwards, he co-founded Safe Superintelligence (SSI) with “One Goal and One Product: If It’s Safe If It’s Not Hard.” Details about what exactly the startups are doing are scarce. It has no product or revenue. But investors are looking for work anyway, but they were able to raise $2 billion, with the latest valuation reportedly rising to $32 billion this month. SSI is based in Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel.
MIRA MURATI – Thinking Machine Lab
Openai CTO Mira Murati left Openai last year and found the Thinking Machines Lab, which emerged from Stealth in February 2025, (or rather vaguely) announced that it would be building a more “customized” and “competent” AI. San Francisco AI startups have no products or revenue, but many former top open rai researchers do not. It is reportedly in the process of raising a massive seed round of at least $10 billion.
Aravind Srinivas – Confusing
Aravind Srinivas worked as a research scientist for a year at Openai until 2022. He left the company to co-found the baffling AI search engine. His startup has gathered a string of well-known investors like Jeff Bezos and Nuvidia, but has also sparked controversy over unethical web scraping. San Francisco-based Perplexity currently raises approximately $1 billion at a valuation of $18 billion as of March 2025.
Kyle Kosic – Xai
Kyle Kosic left Openai in 2023 to provide rival chatbot Grok, an AI startup for Elon Musk, co-founder and infrastructure lead of Xai. However, in 2024 he returned to Open Rye. Palo Alto-based Xai recently acquired its former Twitter, X, giving the total organization a $113 billion valuation. The trading of all stocks raised some eyebrows, but it’s pretty much if you’re betting on the Musk Empire.
Emmett Shear – Stem AI
Emmett Shear was former CEO of Twitch, who was Openai’s interim CEO in November 2023, before Sam Altman rejoined the company. Shear is working on his own stealth startup called STEM AI, TechCrunch revealed in 2024. So far, there is little details about its activities and funding, but it has already raised funds from Andreessen Horowitz.
Andrej Karpathy – Eureka Labs
Computer vision expert Andrej Karpathy is a founding member and research scientist of Openai, and in 2017, the startup joined Tesla to lead the autopilot program. Karpathy is also well known for its YouTube videos that explain the concept of core AI. He left Tesla in 2024 and found the teaching technology startup for Eureka Labs, a San Francisco-based startup that builds AI teaching assistants.
Jeff Arnold – Pilot
Jeff Arnold worked as head of Openai for five months in 2016 before co-founding the San Francisco-based accounting startup pilot in 2016. It first focused on startup accounting, bringing up the $100 million Series C in 2021 at a $1.2 billion valuation, attracting investors like Jeff Bezos. Arnold worked as the pilot’s COO until he left in 2024 and launched the VC fund.
David Luan – Adept AI Labs
David Luan was Openai’s VP of Engineering until he left in 2020. After a stint at Google, he co-founded Adept AI Labs, a startup building AI tools for employees in 2021. The startup last raised $350 million at a $1 billion north valuation in 2023, but in late 2024, Luan left to oversee Amazon’s AI Agent Lab after hiring Amazon’s founder.
Tim Shee – Cresta
According to his LinkedIn profile, Tim Shi was an early member of Openai’s team, focusing on building Safe Artificial General Information (AGI). He worked at Openai for a year in 2017, and found Cresta, a San Francisco-based AI contact center startup that raised more than $270 million from VCs such as Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Peter Abubeer, Peter Chen, Locky Duan – Co-variant
All of the trio worked as research scientists at Open Ally in 2016 and 2017 before establishing Covariant, a Berkeley, California-based startup that builds basic AI models for robots. In 2024, Amazon hired all three Co-variant founders and about a quarter of its staff. Semi-acquisition was seen as part of a broader trend in large technologies to avoid antitrust scrutiny.
Maddy Hall – Living Carbon
Maddie Hall worked on “Special Projects” at Openai, but in 2019 he co-founded Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based startup. It aims to create engineered plants that can suck more carbon from the sky to combat climate change. According to a press release, Living Carbon raised a $21 million Series A round in 2023, bringing total funding to $36 million up until then.
Shariq Hashme – Prosper Robotics
Shariq Hashme worked at Openai for nine months in 2017 with a bot that allows you to play the popular video game Dota, depending on your LinkedIn profile. A few years after Data Label 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 working on.
Jonas Schneider – Daedalus
Jonas Schneider led Openai software engineering for the Robotics team, but in 2019 he co-founded Daedalus to build an advanced factory for precision components. The San Francisco-based startup raised a $21 million Series A last year with support from Khosla Ventures.
Margaret Jennings – Kinso
Margaret Jennings worked at Open Ally in 2022 and 2023. According to a LinkedIn profile, Kindo raised more than $27 million in funding and raised more than $20 million Series A in 2024.