No billionaire left behind.

AfterMark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley notables plunked down capitalin a $40 million growth round for San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup Vicarious, a few more billionaires showed up.

Amazon CEOJeff Bezos, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Skype co-founderJanus Friis and Salesforce CEOMarc Benioff all showed up to give Vicariousan additional shot ofcapital in its Series B round.

The company isnt disclosing how much extra fundingtheyre getting from these four, but its definitely not angel-sized, co-founder D. Scott Phoenix tells us. (I also cant really think of a time when this many CEOs and founders of this stature got together to personally fund a company.)

Vicariousis working on the next generation of artificial intelligence technology.Phoenix said that the AI field is stillcenteredaroundconvolutional neural network technology thatwas developed back in the1980s.

But by more closely mimicking how the brain works, Phoenix and his neuroscientist co-founderDileep George say that theyve been able to make breakthroughs in performance and speed. Last fall, they showed off a way to solve Captcha queries.

Theyre hoping that Vicarious technology will eventually lead to the worlds first intelligent machines.

The company is still incredibly small at this point, with more than $56 million raised for a headcount of 10 employees (which sounds crazy). But Phoenix said theyre planning to ramp up headcount dramatically.

Vicariouss other investors include Joe Lonsdales Formation 8; Vinod Khosla; Ashton Kutcher; Aydin Senkuts Felicis Ventures; Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanians Initialized Capital; Bryan Johnston of Braintree; Box.com CEO Aaron Levie; Sam Altman; Open Field Capital; Zarco Investment Group; and Metaplanet Holdings.

See the article here:

Artificial Intelligence Startup Vicarious Grabs Funding From Bezos, Benioff And Jerry Yang