Flourish, a startup reverse-engineering the human brain to build more efficient AI, raised $500 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. The round was backed by Jeff Bezos, Lux Capital, GV (Alphabet's venture arm), and Catalio Capital, with Bezos reportedly nearly doubling his initial $50 million commitment.
The company is developing Cortex AI, a system based on connectomics research that aims to replicate what co-founders Thomas Reardon and Rob Williams call the brain's core algorithm. Their power target is 20 to 50 watts, comparable to the human brain's approximately 20-watt draw, versus the far higher energy demand of today's GPU clusters.
Reardon brings significant credibility to the venture. He created Internet Explorer at Microsoft and later founded CTRL-labs, a neural interface startup acquired by Meta in 2019 for approximately $1 billion.
The funding reflects growing investor appetite for approaches that tackle AI's energy problem at the architectural level rather than through incremental hardware improvements. A server-grade GPU uses roughly 30 times more energy to process information than the human brain, according to the company, making efficiency gains at this scale potentially transformative for the economics of AI deployment.