Reflection, a New York-based AI startup founded by former Google DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, is in talks to raise 2.5 billion dollars at a 25 billion dollar valuation, according to multiple reports. The round would represent a threefold increase from the company’s previous valuation of 8 billion dollars, which was set when Nvidia invested approximately 800 million dollars in an earlier round.
JPMorgan Chase is in talks to participate through its Security and Resiliency Initiative, a program launched in December that plans to invest up to 10 billion dollars across venture-backed startups tied to national security and critical infrastructure. Existing investor Disruptive is also expected to join the round.
Reflection’s core focus is automating software development with AI systems that can write, test, and maintain code at scale. The company is building freely available AI systems designed to run efficiently on Nvidia hardware, positioning itself within a small group of Nvidia-backed startups working to establish a network of open AI models that companies, research labs, and universities can use and adapt.
If completed, the deal would rank among the largest funding rounds ever tied to an open-source AI effort. The valuation represents an upward revision from earlier expectations reported by the Financial Times, which had suggested Reflection was targeting more than 20 billion dollars. The increase signals growing investor confidence in the company’s positioning.
The competitive landscape for open-source AI development has intensified significantly. China’s DeepSeek demonstrated with its R1 model that competitive AI performance could be achieved with a fraction of typical training budgets. Meta continues to expand its Llama model family, which has accumulated hundreds of millions of downloads. Mistral AI has established a foothold in regulated European industries after raising more than one billion dollars.
Reflection’s bet is that the market for enterprise AI code automation is large enough and strategically important enough to justify the valuation premium. The Nvidia backing provides both capital and preferential access to GPU supply, while the open-weight approach is intended to attract the developer ecosystem needed to build competitive momentum against both proprietary and Chinese open-source alternatives.
