Reflection AI Targets $1 Billion to Take on Meta, DeepSeek in Open Source

Reflection AI, a one-year-old startup co-founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, is in talks to raise more than $1 billion to fund its efforts to develop open-source large language models to compete with the likes of China’s DeepSeek, France’s Mistral and U.S-based Meta Platforms, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The company has raised most of its target, according to one of those people.

The New York-based startup will use some of the money for the cost-intensive development of new AI models. Co-founders Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou have told Reflection employees they believe there is an opportunity to establish Reflection AI as the preeminent U.S.-based provider of open-source AI models, said one of the people. Its ambitions show how the popularity of DeepSeek and other Chinese AI models has catalyzed U.S. AI companies to work on open-source.