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Home/Founder Stories/Venture Capital & AI/Daniel Gross
VERIFIED PROFILE•2026-05-01
Venture Capital & AIVERIFIED FOUNDER

Daniel Gross

Co-Founder (Safe Superintelligence) of SSI / Pioneer

"Daniel Gross is one of Silicon Valley's most prolific AI backers, funding the next wave of foundation models and AGI safety research."

By UpForge Editorial•Palo Alto, United States•Published 2026-05-01•Valuation: $5B
Daniel Gross, Co-Founder (Safe Superintelligence) of SSI / Pioneer — UpForge Verified Founder

Daniel Gross

Co-Founder (Safe Superintelligence) • SSI / Pioneer

Teenage Prodigy to Apple Director

Daniel Gross entered Y Combinator at age 18 to build search engine Cue, which Apple acquired in 2013. At Apple, Gross led search and machine learning teams before transitioning into global tech venture investing.

The Compute Capitalist

Alongside Nat Friedman, Gross raised huge compute funds to buy tens of thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs, offering startup founders raw AI compute clusters instead of traditional venture capital cash.

Co-Founding SSI

In 2024, Gross partnered with Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy to co-found Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), raising $1B to build superintelligence without short-term product distractions.

“
"Capital is commodity; compute and talent are the real bottlenecks of the intelligence age."

— Daniel Gross, SSI / Pioneer

FOUNDER LESSON & TAKEAWAY

Supply founders with what they actually need to win—whether that is GPU compute or unconstrained long-term focus.

Daniel Gross, Co-Founder (Safe Superintelligence) of SSI / Pioneer — UpForge Verified Founder
Venture Capital & AI

Daniel Gross

Co-Founder (Safe Superintelligence) • SSI / Pioneer

VERIFICATION VERIFIED
UFRN CodeUF-2026-US-XXXXX
CompanySSI / Pioneer
Founded2024
Valuation$5B
Total Funding$1B

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