Standard Intelligence Raises $75M From Sequoia and Spark Capital at $500M Valuation With Just 6 Employees

Standard Intelligence, a six-person AI startup founded by 21-year-old Galen Mead and 20-year-old Devansh Pandey (who met at the Atlas Fellowship and dropped out of college), raised $75 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital and Spark Capital at a $500 million post-money valuation. Angel investors include Andrej Karpathy, Milan Kovac, and Stanley Druckenmiller. The company's FDM-1 model takes computer use from data-constrained to compute-constrained by using video pretraining on 11+ million hours of screen recordings instead of screenshot annotations, enabling 1M token context windows. The funding will be used to purchase additional computing capacity and develop AI safety guardrails.