Imbue is a San Francisco-based AI research lab that trains foundational models to develop AI agents. Imbue was founded by Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht in 2021. They recently raised $200m in September 2023 at a $1 billion valuation, making them one of the very few female-led AI unicorns. Imbue’s focus is an AI “agent”: a type of computing system that can simulate human decision-making to complete complex tasks, ensuring they are robust, secure and safe. Whilst chatbots like ChatGPT receive a user’s query and generate a near-instant response, Imbue’s agents would act more like a virtual research assistant that can crunch analysis, recommend follow-on experiments and even set them up, all unsupervised.