OpenAI Mafia: 18 startups founded by graduates

Move over, PayPal mafia: There’s a new tech mafia in Silicon Valley. As the startup behind ChatGPT, OpenAI is arguably the biggest AI player in town. The company is now reportedly in talks to finalize a $100 billion deal to value the company The company is worth more than $850 billion.

Many employees have come and gone since the company first launched a decade ago, some of whom have launched startups of their own. Of these companies, some have become major competitors (such as Anthropic), while others, based on investor interest alone, have managed to raise billions without even launching a product (see: Thinking Machine Labs).

In January, Alyssa Rosenthal, OpenAI’s first director of sales, talked a little about this growing network. she, Like other OpenAI graduates She, who did not become a founder, decided to become an investor and said she would tap into the network of previous OpenAI founders to look for deal flow. We know Peter Ding, former head of consumer products at OpenAI (and now general partner at Felicis). actually.

Here’s a summary of top startups founded by OpenAI alumni, in alphabetical order. We are sure that this list will grow over time.

David Luan – Artificial Intelligence Labs

David Luan was vice president of engineering at OpenAI until he left in 2020. After a stint at Google, in 2021 he co-founded Adept AI Labs, a startup that builds AI tools for employees. startup It raised another $350 million at a northern valuation Billion dollars in 2023, but Luan He left in late 2024 to oversee Amazon’s AI agent lab after Amazon hired the founders of Adept.

Dario Amudi, Daniela Amudi, and John Shulman – Anthropists

Siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei left OpenAI in 2021 to form their San Francisco-based startup Anthropic, which has long been known for Described Focus on AI safety. OpenAI co-founder John Shulman Join Anthropic in 2024pledging to build “safe artificial general intelligence.” The company has since become OpenAI’s biggest competitor and has just filed Series G worth $30 billion, gets a valuation of $380 billion In this process. IPO Rumors also spread The company is said to be preparing for a public listing that may come sometime this year. (OpenAI is also allegedly preparing to go public this year and it is Maybe he’s trying to overcome Anthropy to the general market.)

Cadence Garg, Linden Lee, Yash Patel – Applied calculation

Three former OpenAI employees (Rhythm Garg, Linden Li, and Yash Patil) have reportedly raised $20 million for a startup called Applied Compute, as well. Reported by Upstart Media. The three of them worked as technical staff at OpenAI for more than a year before leaving last May to launch the startup. To each their LinkedIns. The startup helps organizations train and deploy custom AI agents. Benchmark led the round, valuing the 10-month-old company at $100 million, Upstart Media reported.

Peter Appel, Peter Chen, and Rocky Doan – variable

The trio all worked at OpenAI in 2016 and 2017 as research scientists before founding Covariant, a Berkeley, Calif.-based startup that builds basic AI models for robots. In 2024, Amazon hired all three Covariant founders and about a quarter of its employees. It was almost possessive Some people look at it As part of a broader trend of big tech companies trying to avoid antitrust scrutiny.

Tim Shea – Christa

Tim Shi was an early member of the OpenAI team, focused on building secure artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to his LinkedIn profile. He worked at OpenAI for a year in 2017 but left to found Cresta, a San Francisco-based AI contact center startup that has raised more than $270 million from venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and others, according to press release.

Jonas Schneider – Daedalus

Jonas Schneider led the software engineering team for robotics at OpenAI, but left in 2019 to co-found Daedalus, which builds advanced factories for microcomponents. The San Francisco-based startup It raised a $21 million Series A last year Backed by Khosla Ventures, among others.

Andrej Karpathy – Eureka Laboratories

Computer vision expert Andrzej Karpathy, a founding member and research scientist at OpenAI, has left The startup will join Tesla in 2017 To drive its own autopilot program. Karpathy is also known for his YouTube website videos Explain basic artificial intelligence concepts. Tesla left in 2024 to He founded his own educational technology startupEureka Labs, a San Francisco-based startup that builds artificial intelligence teaching assistants.

Margaret Jennings – Kendo

Margaret Jennings worked at OpenAI in 2022 and 2023 until she left to co-found Kindo, which It markets itself as an AI-powered chatbot for enterprises. Kindo has recently raised more than $27 million in funding to lift Series A of $20.6 million in 2024. Jennings left Kindo in 2024 to head product and research at French AI startup Mistral, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Maddy Hall – Living Carbon

Maddie Hall worked on “special projects” at OpenAI but left in 2019 to found Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based startup that aims to engineer factories that can suck more carbon from the sky to combat climate change. Living Carbon raised a $21 million funding round in 2023, bringing its total funding to then to $36 million, according to press release.

Liam Vidos – Periodic laboratories

Liam Fidos, vice president of post-training research at OpenAI, left the company in March 2025 to join his former Google Brain colleague, Ekin Dogus Coppock, and Launching periodic laboratories. The startup seeks to use artificial intelligence scientists to find new materials, especially new superconducting materials. It came out of stealth mode in September 2025, Armed with a whopping $300 million In a seed funding round with backers including Jez Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Phylicis, and Andreessen Horowitz.

Aravind Srinivas – Confusion

Aravind Srinivas worked as a research scientist at OpenAI for a year until 2022, when he left the company to co-found the AI ​​search engine Perplexity. His startup has attracted a series of high-profile investors such as Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, although it is also… It sparked controversy Due to allegedly unethical web scraping. Perplexity, based in San Francisco, last reported A Raised $200 million at a valuation of $20 billion.

Jeff Arnold – pilot

Jeff Arnold served as COO of OpenAI for five months in 2016 before co-founding San Francisco-based accounting firm Pilot in 2017. Pilot, which initially focused on accounting for startups, It last raised a $100 million Series C in 2021 at a $1.2 billion valuation It attracted investors such as Jeff Bezos. Arnold served as Pilot’s chief operating officer until leaving In 2024 to launch a venture capital fund.

Shariq Hashemi – Prosper Robotics Company

Shariq Hashem worked at OpenAI for nine months in 2017 on a bot that could play the popular video game Dota, according to his LinkedIn profile. After a few years working at data classification startup Scale AI, he co-founded London-based Prosper Robotics in 2021. The startup says it is working on an automated server for people’s homes, a hot trend in robotics that other players are catching on. Like Norway 1X and Texas-based Aptronic We are also working on.

Ilya Sutskever – secure superintelligence

OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever He left OpenAI in May 2024 After it was reported Part of a failed effort to replace CEO Sam Altman. Shortly after, he rose He co-founded Safe Superintelligence, or SSI“With one goal and one product: safe superintelligence,” he says. Details about what the startup intends to do are scant: It has no product and no revenue yet. But investors are clamoring for a piece anyway, and they’ve managed to raise $2 billion, according to a recent valuation. To rise to $32 billion This month. SSI is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel.

Emmett Sherr – Artificial Intelligence Trunk

Emmett Shear is the former CEO of Twitch who was Interim CEO of OpenAI in November 2023 For a few days before that Sam Altman has returned to the company. Shear launched an AI company, StemAI, in 2024 (although it appears to have since been rebranded as… Soft Max). The company, which appears to be a research firm, has attracted funding from Andreessen Horowitz.

Mira Moratti – Thinking Machines Laboratory

Mira Moratti, CTO of OpenAI, left OpenAI to found her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, which It emerged from the hidden in February 2025. It said at the time (somewhat vaguely) that it would build a more “customizable” and “capable” AI. The San Francisco AI startup, now valued at $12 billion, announced its first product late last year: an application programming interface (API) that fine-tunes language models. It recently made headlines when two of its founders announced earlier this year that they… It will return to OpenAI.

Kyle Kosic — xAI

Kyle Kosich left OpenAI in 2023 to become co-founder and infrastructure lead for xAI, Elon Musk’s AI startup that offers a competing chatbot, Grok. However, in 2024 Hop again To OpenAI, where it remains. Meanwhile, xAI (which acquired Musk’s social media site X) was bought by SpaceX Maskgiving the merger a valuation of $1.25 trillion. that it We look forward to going public sometime in June For what could be a historical list.

Angela Jiang – Worktrace AI

Angela Jiang left OpenAI in 2024, after working as a product manager and on the public policy team. In April 2025, she Worktrace has been quietly launchedwhich uses artificial intelligence to help businesses Make business operations more efficient. It monitors employees’ work patterns and automates workflow, according to the company’s website. This work is supported by Mura Murati, former CTO at OpenAI, who launched Thinking Labs. It’s also backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund, as well as a slew of other OpenAI names, like Chief Strategy Officer, Jason Kwon.

Stealth startups

In addition to these startups, a number of former OpenAI employees have founded startups that remain in stealth mode, according to various updates TechCrunch found on LinkedIn. For example, former OpenAI researcher Danilo Hellermark has apparently been working on an AI startup for the past few years. He officially left OpenAI at the beginning of 2023 Also one apparently in the works of Lucas Negrito, Who worked on the OpenAI technical team and left the company in 2023 after three years. Since then, he has founded a startup and has been working on another since August 2025, according to his LinkedIn.