- Flourish, co-founded by Internet Explorer creator Thomas Reardon, has raised $500M at a $2.5B valuation to build AI that runs on the same energy budget as the human brain.
- Jeff Bezos nearly doubled an initial $50M commitment to contribute close to $100M; Lux Capital and GV also participated.
- The startup has no product yet, and faces architecture-layer rivals including Groq, Cerebras, and Etched.
New York-based Flourish has raised $500M at a $2.5B valuation, according to Wired, with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos contributing nearly $100M after nearly doubling an initial $50M commitment.
Lux Capital, GV, and Catalio Capital also participated in the round, which closed approximately five weeks after discussions began in late April.
The rise arrives as AI’s power problem reaches a breaking point. Hyperscalers are competing for grid access, cooling capacity, and dedicated nuclear power just to keep training clusters running. Flourish’s thesis is that the industry is optimising at the wrong layer, and that reverse-engineering the brain’s actual efficiency mechanisms, rather than loosely mimicking them, is the only credible path to sustainable AI at scale.
The startup is building a system called Cortex AI, which uses connectomics to design AI architectures that target an energy draw of just 20 to 50 watts. A single server-grade GPU, by comparison, consumes more than 30 times that amount.
The company was co-founded in 2024 by Thomas Reardon and Rob Williams. Reardon built Internet Explorer at Microsoft in 1994, then co-founded CTRL-labs, a neural interface startup that translated wrist muscle signals into computer commands. Meta acquired it in 2019 for between $500M and $1B, after which Reardon led neuromotor interface projects at Meta Reality Labs.
That architecture-first approach puts Flourish in direct competition with a wave of efficiency-focused AI ventures. Groq and Cerebras build specialised chips for faster, lower-power AI inference. Etched produces transformer-specific chips that consume less energy than standard GPUs.
While those rivals are improving efficiency through custom silicon, Flourish is betting it can do so through algorithms and architecture. If it works, it would make Cortex AI deployable on existing hardware.
Flourish has no commercial product and no disclosed revenue. The $2.5B valuation, which some sources suggest could stretch to $3.5B, is a bet on the founding team’s track record and on how urgently the industry needs a different answer to the energy problem.
