San Francisco, CA – Parag Agrawal, the former CEO of Twitter who was ousted after the company was acquired by Elon Musk last year, has raised $30 million in funding for his new artificial intelligence startup, according to a report from The Information.
The new startup, named Untitled Labs, is developing AI models that can write computer code and content on their own with minimal human input. The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, the prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has backed companies like Facebook, Airbnb, and Coinbase.
“We are in the very early days of this technology and its impact on developers and business users. We seek to scale the technology so it reaches developers across the world,” said Parag Agrawal about his startup.
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Parag Agrawal was appointed CEO of Twitter in 2021 after co-founder Jack Dorsey stepped down. He led the company until billionaire Tesla chief Elon Musk closed a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter in October 2022. Musk fired Agrawal and other top Twitter executives shortly after taking over.
Since then, Parag Agrawal has maintained a relatively low profile, though reports emerged he was planning to start his own web3 and AI-focused venture. With Untitled Labs now coming out of stealth mode with $30 million in fresh funding, more details are emerging about Agrawal’s newest project.
“Parag has assembled an all-star team to build the next great AI company. We are excited to partner with him again as he leads the startup from stealth,” said Connie Chan, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz about backing Parag Agrawal once again.
At Twitter under Parag Agrawal’s leadership, machine learning and AI were vital areas of investment, particularly for content moderation and recommendation systems. Parag Agrawal has a long history in the AI field, having completed a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford focused on large-scale data mining and modeling. Before becoming Twitter’s CEO, he led the company’s technical strategy involving AI and ML for over four years.
Untitled Labs currently has about 15 employees and is actively recruiting for roles across engineering, product, and design. The startup is based in San Francisco’s Mission district. Along with Parag Agrawal, Jonathan Yan, a former executive from Snap and Facebook, serves as co-founder and CTO at Untitled Labs.
“We are thrilled to have Jon on board. His experience in scaling consumer internet products and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in AI will be instrumental to our vision,” said Parag Agrawal about Yan.
While full details about Untitled Labs’ product roadmap remain unclear, the underlying technology aims to streamline software development using AI. This could enable faster and more efficient coding, allowing developers to build products to meet rapidly evolving consumer and business needs.
“Businesses today need to ship quality software faster than ever before to remain competitive. Our models turn complex problems into simple interfaces to help developers code faster,” said Yan about the startup’s ambitions.
Untitled Labs is part of a new wave of AI startups offering “synthetic” content generated by advanced deep learning models. Companies like Anthropic, Alphabet’s Anthropic, and Stability AI are using self-learning algorithms trained on huge datasets to produce human-like writing, code, designs and more to augment human capabilities.
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Investor interest in “synthetic media” startups is surging, with over $2 billion in funding flowing into the space last year according to Pitchbook data. Major tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Baidu are also pouring resources into generative AI models. Venture capitalists see massive potential in the technology to enable new products, services, and levels of productivity.
Still, synthetic media startups like Parag Agrawal Untitled Labs face skepticism from critics about the viability of AI-generated content. Concerns around copyright, data bias, and model integrity have to be addressed thoughtfully as the technology evolves.
“We recognize this is an enormously consequential technology. Our guiding principles are grounded in ethics, transparency, and control,” said Parag Agrawal, addressing some of the concerns swirling around AI startups like his. “We are committed to building this responsibly.”
For now, details remain scant on what exactly Untitled Labs is building and plans to offer customers. But with Parag Agrawal’s pedigree, technical experience at giants like Twitter and Microsoft, and the backing of one of Silicon Valley’s top VC firms, expectations will be high for the synthetic AI startup as it now heads into public view.
