Goodfire Secures $50M to Decode AI's Inner Workings

Goodfire Lands $50M From Anthropic & Silicon Valley Giants To Open The Black Box Of AI -- Before It Rewrites Us First

Enter your email to get Benzinga's ultimate morning update: The PreMarket Activity Newsletter Goodfire, an ambitious AI startup launched by seasoned entrepreneur Eric Ho, DeepMind alumnus Thomas McGrath, and Daniel Balsam, a founding engineer at RippleMatch, just raised a $50 million Series A round led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Anthropic, Lightspeed Venture Partners, B Capital, Work-Bench, Wing, and South Park Commons. The company is building Ember, an interpretability platform designed to expose and reprogram the internal logic of advanced AI models. Rather than relying on input/output behavior or prompt engineering, Ember gives developers direct, programmable access to what's actually happening inside the model's neural networks, according to Goodfire. Don't Miss: 'Scrolling To UBI' -- Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. You can invest today for just $0.26/share with a $1000 minimum. Hasbro, MGM, and Skechers trust this AI marketing firm -- invest pre-IPO from $0.60 per share now. Goodfire Is Breaking Open the Black Box AI models are often referred to as "black boxes" due to their complex and opaque decision-making processes. Goodfire aims to change that narrative by developing tools that allow developers to peer inside these models, understand their reasoning, and guide their behavior toward safer and more reliable outcomes. Founded in 2024 and based in San Francisco, Goodfire is positioning itself as a foundational player in mechanistic interpretability, a rapidly growing field aimed at making AI less of a black box and more of a controllable system, writes Tech Startups. Goodfire's team comprises some of the most respected names in AI research. According to Fast Company, Lee Sharkey is known for his work on sparse autoencoders in language models, while Nick Cammarata, another team member, started the interpretability team at OpenAI alongside Chris Olah, who later co-founded Anthropic. Trending: Donald Trump Just Announced a $500 Billion AI Infrastructure Deal -- Here's How You Can Invest in the Entertainment Market's Next Big Disruptor for Just $998 According to Tech Startups, Anthropic, the AI safety-focused startup behind the Claude chatbot, made its first-ever startup investment by contributing $1 million to Goodfire's Series A round. This investment signals growing industry consensus that tools enabling transparency and control are critical infrastructure for the next generation of AI. Goodfire's Vision Eric Ho, co-founder and CEO of Goodfire, emphasized the significance of their work in the startup's funding announcement: "Nobody understands the mechanisms by which AI models fail, so no one knows how to fix them. Our vision is to build tools to make neural networks easy to understand, design, and fix from the inside out. This technology is critical for building the next frontier of safe and powerful foundation models." According to Fast Company, Goodfire has started receiving interest from Fortune 500 companies looking to understand and influence how their AI models "think" since many still treat these systems like traditional software, expecting reprogrammable logic where none exists, explained Eric Ho. Language models respond with probability, not precision, and reshaping their behavior means diving deep into how they reason. Goodfire's tools offer companies a first step toward that kind of control, even if the science is still in its early stages. See Also: BlackRock is calling 2025 the year of alternative assets. One firm from NYC has quietly built a group of 60,000+ investors who have all joined in on an alt asset class previously exclusive to billionaires like Bezos and Gates. Goodfire's Ember platform is already being utilized by organizations like the Arc Institute to extract novel biological concepts from their DNA foundation model, Evo 2. This collaboration has enabled scientists to uncover insights that were previously hidden within the model's complex structure. The Road Ahead With the new funding, Goodfire plans to expand its research initiatives and enhance the Ember platform. The goal is to make AI systems more transparent, controllable, and aligned with human values. As AI continues to permeate various aspects of society, tools like Ember will be instrumental in ensuring that these systems operate safely and effectively. Read Next: Are you rich? Here's what Americans think you need to be considered wealthy. Deloitte's fastest-growing software company partners with Amazon, Walmart & Target - Many are rushing to grab 4,000 of its pre-IPO shares for just $0.26/share! Image: Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Anthropic-Backed Goodfire Raises $50 Million to Access AI's 'Internal Thoughts' | PYMNTS.com

Goodfire raised $50 million in a Series A funding round to support its efforts to help enterprises understand and design artificial intelligence (AI) models. The company will use the new funding to expand its research initiatives and further the development of its flagship interpretability platform, Ember, Goodfire said in an April 17 press release. "Nobody understands the mechanisms by which AI models fail, so no one knows how to fix them," Goodfire Co-founder and CEO Eric Ho said in the release. "Our vision is to build tools to make neural networks easy to understand, design and fix from the inside out." Goodfire's research focuses on mechanistic interpretability, which aims to reverse engineer neural networks to gain insight into how they work, according to the release. The company's platform, Ember, decodes the neurons inside an AI model, gives direct access to its "internal thoughts," and enables users to precisely shape the behaviors and improve the performance of their AI models, per the release. Deedy Das, investor at Menlo Ventures, which led the funding round, said in the release that Goodfire is "cracking open that box" so enterprises can truly understand their AI systems. AI startup Anthropic participated in the round, marking the company's first investment in another startup, The Information reported April 17. In the press release, Anthropic CEO and Co-founder Dario Amodei said Goodfire's efforts will help companies better understand AI systems as the systems' capabilities advance. "Our investment in Goodfire reflects our belief that mechanistic interpretability is among the best bets to help us transform black-box neural networks into understandable, steerable systems -- a critical foundation for the responsible development of powerful AI," Amodei said. When Anthropic said in March that it raised $3.5 billion in a Series E funding round to expand its AI offerings, it added that it would use the new funding in part to research mechanistic interpretability. "With this investment, Anthropic will advance its development of next-generation AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion," the company said at the time in a press release.