A Nvidia-backed AI start-up called Reflection AI is in funding talks that would value it at over $20 billion, more than double its October valuation of $8 billion. The New York-based company, founded by former Google DeepMind scientists Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, is seeking to raise at least another $2 billion in a new funding round.

The company builds open AI models that developers can freely download and modify, positioning itself as a counterweight to Chinese rivals like Alibaba and DeepSeek. Reflection has been hiring researchers who worked on leading models including OpenAI's GPT-5 and Google's Gemini. The two-year-old start-up has not yet released a public model but claims progress on a coding agent and open-weight frontier AI development.

The Trump administration has welcomed Reflection's efforts to build an open-source large language model ecosystem in the US. White House chief of science and technology policy Michael Kratsios cited the company as doing "tremendous work in this space." Venture capital firm Disruptive, which led the last funding round, is expected to invest again along with Nvidia and other major investors including Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.