Elon Musk’s AI Company, Xai, has acquired a hotshot, a start -up to AI -powered video tools according to Openai’s Sora lines.
Aakash Sastry, Managing Director of Hotshot and Co -Founder, announced the news In a post on x on Monday.
“In the last 2 years we have created 3 video foundation models as a small group-hotshot-xl, hotshot act one and hotshot,” Sastry wrote. “The training of these models has given us a look at how world education, entertainment, communication and productivity is going to change in the coming years. We are excited to continue to scale these efforts in the world’s largest cluster, Colossus, as part of Xai!”
The hotshot, based in San Francisco, was founded several years ago by Sastry and John Mullan. The start was initially focused on developing AI -working photo creation and editing tools, but eventually revolved in favor of video models in a video AI.
Some news – we’re excited to announce that @Hotshotsupport has been acquired by @xai 🚀
For the last 2 years we have created 3 video foundation models as a small team-hotshot-XL, Hotshot Act One and Hotshot.
The training of these models gave us a look at how world education,… pic.twitter.com/w4rmyuxnmr
– Aakash (@Aakashsastry) March 17 2025
Hotshot has managed to attract investments from VCS, such as Lachy Groom, co -founder Reddit Alexis Ohanian and SV Angel before leaving. The company has never publicly disclosed the size of the funding rounds.
The acquisition of Xai’s hotshot could indicate that the former plans to create its own generation video models to compete with Sora, Google’s VEO 2 and more. Musk has previously hinted that XAI is developing video creation models to add to the Grok Chatbot platform. During a lifetime in JanuaryMusk said he was expecting a “Grok Video” model to be released in a few months.
Noise said on his website That started to have a new video creation on March 14th. Existing customers will have until March 30 to download videos they have created using the platform, the company added.
It was not immediately clear if the whole Hotshot staff would participate in XAI. Sastry refused to comment.
