Andreessen Horowitz Backs Jev Maker at $7.5 Billion Value

TypeSafe AI, the startup behind Jev, a new artificial intelligence model that went viral after it launched only a few weeks ago, has raised about $870 million at a $7.5 billion valuation in a financing led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The deal came together just weeks after the Jev launch video went viral, which TypeSafe co-founder Diogo Almeida said led to a surge of interest in the company from other chief executives, developers and investors. Jev is now used by about a third of Fortune 500 companies, according to the startup, which declined to disclose any names. The model surpassed one million users in a matter of days, it said.

The growth of the San Francisco-based company drew funding from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture firms. OpenAI- and xAI-backer Andreessen Horowitz wrote the largest check in the latest round, and Sequoia Capital also participated in the financing, alongside various angel investors.

Jev, which was created by researchers from OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, is the startup’s first public AI model for developers. Unlike models from the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic PBC, Jev doesn’t chat, write emails or generate code. Instead, the model plugs into software to make decisions, and because it doesn’t generate text token by token, it can perform tasks more cheaply and quickly than large-language models, according to the company.

TypeSafe has been a yearslong work in progress, Almeida said in an interview. The chief executive officer, who started the company in 2024, said he’s watched AI players overpromise and underdeliver for years. The company aims to make a difference in AI trust by providing a reliable and affordable option with Jev and updates that are planned in the next several months, he said.

AI developers including OpenAI, Meta and SpaceXAI are competing to offer cost-efficient AI models as businesses increasingly scrutinize their AI spending. The emphasis on affordability has grown as China and its lower-cost open-weight AI models show signs of gaining ground, and as more companies embrace such offerings to cut their reliance on costlier options.

Many current AI models have “fractured jaggedness of intelligence,” Almeida said. “If you get Einstein 95% of the time, but Mr. Bean the other 5% of the time, that is completely useless for automation.”

TypeSafe, which now has a skeleton crew of just over 20 staffers, plans to use its new capital to help scale up the deployment of its products, hire more staff and secure more computing capacity. The startup said it now processes trillions of tokens every day.

Prior to backing TypeSafe, Andreessen Horowitz was an early and frequent investor in Cursor, one of the fastest-growing AI software businesses in history. This year, Cursor was acquired by SpaceX in a $60 billion deal, helping the coding company get access to more compute. Andreessen Horowitz also helps its portfolio companies find computing resources, from negotiating contracts and getting special pricing, according to a spokesperson.

Andreesen Horowitz General Partner Martin Casado, who will join TypeSafe’s board, drew a number of parallels between Cursor and TypeSafe. While Cursor helped drive AI coding innovation by making it easier for developers to create more software, TypeSafe is helping developers make better software, and for less money, he said.

“There’s almost like a Jev-shaped hole in the industry already,” he said. “All the developers are like, this is what I’ve been trying to do — poorly.”

Almeida says that Jev is profitable after accounting for expenses. The company declined to disclose its revenue.

To celebrate Jev’s initial usage gains, TypeSafe employees had agreed to dye their hair pink, Almeida said. But with staffers working overtime to keep up with demand, Almeida was the only one who managed to do so. He livestreamed it — while working — to the TypeSafe community on Discord.