Nvidia backs Harmonic's $120M Series C as AI math startup reaches $1.45 billion valuation

Exclusive: Nvidia backs Harmonic, a specialized AI math startup

Why it matters: Large language models are doing increasingly well in math contests, but Harmonic says there's still a big market for AI systems that can formally verify the accuracy of their results. The big picture: Nvidia is joining Harmonic's $120 million Series C round, which valued the company at $1.45 billion, Harmonic told Axios. * Emerson Collective is also joining as a new investor, alongside existing backers Ribbit Capital, Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Between the lines: Harmonic says its model, known as Aristotle, is not only solving math challenges, but also showing promise in coding and chip design. * "[Nvidia's] support will help us advance Aristotle's capabilities, accelerate the pace of discovery in mathematics and enable industries to harness the power of mathematical AI for critical, high-stakes problems," Harmonic CEO Tudor Achim said in a statement to Axios. * The company plans to use some of the funding to expand its workforce from under 30 to somewhere between 50 and 75, though much of the money will be used to pay for needed compute resources. Zoom in: Large language models work by predicting the next token rather than operating off a fundamental set of truths. * Harmonic's approach, by contrast, is able to not only solve problems, but also to verifiably show its work. Zoom out: Harmonic launched in 2024 with backing from Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev. * "We see a world where the vast majority of software and hardware will be AI-generated and formally verified, and we're just getting started," Tenev said in a statement. What to watch: Harmonic's API remains in a free beta. The company says it isn't ready to announce how or when it plans to charge for Aristotle.

Nvidia's NVentures backs Harmonic AI in Series C for mathematical superintelligence - SiliconANGLE

Nvidia's NVentures backs Harmonic AI in Series C for mathematical superintelligence Mathematical superintelligence startup Harmonic AI Inc. revealed today that NVentures, the venture capital arm of Nvidia Corp., was among the investors in its $120 million Series C round that was raised on a $1.45 billion valuation in November. The funding is being used to accelerate Harmonic's momentum in developing Aristotle, which the company claims is the world's most advanced mathematical reasoning engine that eliminates hallucinations. Aristotle is an AI engine that specializes in formal mathematical reasoning. The engine uses the Lean 4 proof assistant, a proof assistant that allows users to write mathematical definitions, theorems and proofs in a way that can be checked for correctness by a computer, to translate natural-language math problems into formally verifiable proofs. Mathematical superintelligence is core to the company's approach, with AI that provides reasoning capabilities that match or exceed humans. The methodology involves the use of synthetic data generation for training that, instead of relying on web-scraped data, autonomously generates formal problem-proof pairs, which enable recursive self-improvement. Aristotle is already making waves, with the model achieving Gold Medal-level performance at the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad. More recently, Harmonic has expanded Aristotle's capabilities even further by achieving a new breakthrough in AI coding - a state-of-the-art 96.8% on the Verifiable Code Generation Arena benchmark. The VERINA benchmark, developed by researchers at UC Berkeley and Meta Platforms Inc., serves as a high-quality means of benchmarking verifiable code generation. Harmonic argues that code generation has quickly become one of the most powerful use cases of large language models and yet verifying correctness using informal methods is costly and manual, causing the same verification bottleneck Aristotle has already begun to address for mathematics. "The success of Aristotle in solving major mathematical problems, along with its breakthroughs in fully autonomous theorem proving, demonstrates Harmonic's rapid progress towards achieving Mathematical Superintelligence," said Tudor Achim, chief executive officer of Harmonic. "This support will help us advance Aristotle's capabilities, accelerate the pace of discovery in mathematics and enable industries to harness the power of mathematical AI for critical, high-stakes problems." The new funding follows previous raises of $100 million in Series B funding on a $900 million valuation in July and a Series A raise of $75 million in September 2024. Along with Nvidia's NVentures, other investors in the Series C round included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Paradigm Management, Ribbit Capital Management, Sequoia Capital Operations, Index Ventures Management and Charlie Cheever.