A San Francisco AI company whose model deliberately does not write sentences has raised $870 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE reported Friday, Oct. 9. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, with Sequoia Capital and existing investor DCVC also taking part.

What Jev does differently

TypeSafe AI released its model, Jev, in early access on Sept. 15, alongside a $40 million seed round led by DCVC. Unlike chatbots, Jev does not produce paragraphs of text. According to SiliconANGLE, it handles three kinds of requests: a yes-or-no answer, a pick from a list of options, or a score that developers can define, such as how severe a security alert is or how urgent a support ticket is. Each answer comes with a number showing how confident the model is.

That design is aimed at automation. Software normally has to clean up and reformat a chatbot's text before it can act on it; Jev's answers are already in a form programs can use. TypeSafe claims the model responds in under 700 milliseconds and is up to 200 times faster and up to 100 times cheaper than some leading large language models. Those figures are the company's own and have not been independently confirmed.

Co-founder Diogo Almeida, who previously worked at OpenAI, told TechCrunch last month that AI has been "super good at human language for four years, but it's not useful for automation because computers speak a different language."

Fast growth, local roots

TypeSafe says about a third of Fortune 500 companies already use Jev, according to both outlets. The company was founded in 2024 by Almeida, former Meta research engineer Sasha Sheng and engineer Erik Gafni. Its website says it is "Made in SF," and Hoodline reported the company is based near the Embarcadero and requires its engineers to work in person five days a week.

SiliconANGLE reported the new money will go toward more models in what TypeSafe calls its System One series, plus features to make the models easier for large organizations to use. The round is another sign of how much investor cash is flowing to San Francisco AI startups, a boom that has also been tied to rising demand for office space and apartments in the city.