OpenAI invests in Isara, a $650M startup building AI agent swarms

This article was published on March 27, 2026 Isara, a San Francisco startup that is building software to coordinate thousands of AI agents on complex analytical tasks, has raised $94 million at a $650 million valuation, with OpenAI among the investors. The company was founded nine months ago by two 23-year-olds. It has no product in market. The round was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Investors include Amity Ventures, Michael Ovitz (the former Creative Artists Agency chairman and early Uber backer), and Stanley Druckenmiller, the billionaire hedge fund manager. OpenAI’s participation is notable because one of Isara’s co-founders, Eddie Zhang, is a former OpenAI AI safety researcher. Zhang left the company to start Isara in June 2025 alongside Henry Gasztowtt, a computer science student at the University of Oxford. The pair co-authored a paper at ICML 2024 exploring how AI systems could cooperate to improve policymaking, research that serves as the intellectual foundation for the company. Isara has since hired roughly a dozen additional researchers from Google, Meta, and OpenAI itself. The core idea is multi-agent coordination at scale. Where most current AI applications