- The Pulse by 42neurons
- Posts
- Reflection AI's recent valuation
Reflection AI's recent valuation
Hey there!
Welcome back to The Pulse, where we dive into interesting AI stories and trends backed by data, all presented through simple visuals.

> goal: build AI tools/agents to automate software development
> founded by ex-DeepMind researchers (including AlphaGo co-author)
> single biggest non-frontier funding event of 2025 so far
> 14×+ multiple in ~7 months
> Oct round led by Nvidia - signals strategic compute partnership/preferential GPU access (similar to Inflection AI & CoreWeave) justifying valuation jump

> experimental release that keeps accuracy flat while slashing token costs
> done via sparse attention: model focuses on key tokens & skips rest to save compute
> out Sep 29th; almost same benchmark performance across coding, reasoning, math, search, etc.
> runs on NVIDIA + Chinese accelerators (Ascend, Cambricon, Hygon) — rare multi-hardware compatibility
> code + weights fully open-sourced on Hugging Face/GitHub, inviting replication
> V3.1 kept accessible temporarily but will be replaced by V3.2

CBInsights reports:
record activity: 52 mega-rounds in Sept ($100M+) highest in two years; AI infra captured 78% of total funding
$28.4B raised - driven by companies scaling LLMs & making them more efficient
7 AI-performance companies (e.g. Baseten, Rebellions, Invisible) got mega-rounds; >70% already revenue-positive
capital shifting from pure model-scaling to inference optimization, specialized chips & fine-tuning
60% of sector-specific AI mega-rounds were Series A, most still pre-commercial but backed for strong teams + tech