Flourish

Flourish is a New York-based AI research company building brain-inspired models designed to run at a fraction of the power consumed by today's large language models. Co-founded in 2024 by Thomas Reardon — the creator of Internet Explorer who later founded the brain-computer interface company CTRL-labs (acquired by Meta in 2019) — and former Amazon executive Rob Williams, the company emerged from stealth in 2026 with a $500 million round at a $2.5 billion valuation. Jeff Bezos supplied close to a fifth of the capital, alongside Google Ventures, Lux Capital, and Catalio Capital.

The company's central project is Cortex AI, a system that draws on connectomics — the detailed mapping of real neurons and their connections — to design AI architectures modeled on how biological brains compute. The stated goal is radical energy efficiency: where data-center AI accelerators draw hundreds of watts, Flourish targets architectures that operate on roughly 20 to 50 watts, the order of magnitude of the human brain.

Flourish is a research-stage company with no commercial product yet. Its bet is that the next major gains in AI will come not from larger models running on more power, but from fundamentally different, brain-like architectures that deliver comparable intelligence at a tiny fraction of the energy cost. If it succeeds, the approach could ease the mounting power and infrastructure constraints that increasingly shape the economics of frontier AI.