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Igor Babuschkin Departs xAI to Launch AI-Focused Venture Capital Firm
August 13, 2025
Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI, announced on Wednesday that he is leaving the company to start his own venture capital firm. Babuschkin, who led engineering teams at xAI, played a key role in building the company into one of Silicon Valley’s prominent AI model developers just a few years after its founding.
“Today was my last day at xAI, the company that I helped start with Elon Musk in 2023,” Babuschkin wrote in a post on X. “I still remember the day I first met Elon, we talked for hours about AI and what the future might hold. We both felt that a new AI company with a different kind of mission was needed.”
His new firm, Babuschkin Ventures, will focus on funding AI safety research and backing startups that “advance humanity and unlock the mysteries of our universe.” Babuschkin said he was inspired to launch the fund after a conversation with Max Tegmark, founder of the Future of Life Institute, about how AI systems could be designed to ensure long-term benefits for future generations.
The move follows several turbulent months for xAI, during which its chatbot, Grok, faced controversies — including citing Musk’s personal opinions in responses to sensitive questions, making antisemitic remarks, and introducing a feature enabling the creation of AI-generated videos depicting nude public figures. These incidents sometimes overshadowed the strong performance of xAI’s AI models, which rank competitively against those from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic.
Before co-founding xAI, Babuschkin was part of the Google DeepMind team that developed AlphaStar, an AI that defeated top-ranked players in the video game StarCraft in 2019. He also worked as a researcher at OpenAI prior to the launch of ChatGPT.
Reflecting on his time at xAI, Babuschkin recalled the daunting challenge of building a supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, within just three months — a feat many in the industry thought impossible. While the project succeeded, environmental concerns have been raised about the temporary gas turbines powering it.
“I learned two priceless lessons from Elon: be fearless in rolling up your sleeves to personally dig into technical problems, and have a maniacal sense of urgency,” Babuschkin wrote. He likened leaving xAI to “a proud parent driving away after sending their kid away to college.”
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