Sam Altman-backed college startup Campus acquires Sizzle AI; hires Meta’s exec as technology head

Sam Altman-backed college startup Campus has roped in Meta’s former artificial intelligence (AI) vice president Jerome Pesenti as its technology head, the company announced Friday.

The deal marks Campus buying Pesenti’s AI learning platform, Sizzle AI, for an undisclosed amount, CNBC reported Friday.

Campus will integrate its personalised AI-generated educational content in Sizzle AI. Thus, students or users of Sizzle AI will get tailored learning materials based on AI recommendations.


Campus has raised over $100 million from investors, including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, General Catalyst, NBA star Shaquille O’Neal, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, and Figma CEO Dylan Field.

Campus founder Tade Oyerinde said the acquisition accelerates the company’s roadmap by two to three years and enables more personalised learning for students, calling it “a game changer.”

It serves over 3,000 students, charges $7,320 per academic year, and accepts Pell Grants. The platform offers accredited associate degrees taught by adjunct professors from institutions including Stanford, Princeton, and New York University.

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Altman’s OpenAI biz

Within a month, Sam Altman-led OpenAI has signed significant deals with Oracle, Nvidia, and AMD. The deals, reportedly valued at over $1 trillion according to a Financial Times report, are meant to help the AI major secure the required compute power and cloud capacity to meet rising demand and underpin its hardware ambitions.

OpenAI is expected to pay for the massive deals it has signed in the race to artificial general intelligence (AGI), Altman said. It will also help its partners secure debt as a guarantor.

“We are working on plans to be able to help with the financing these companies need at this kind of scale ahead of revenue. We have some interesting ideas there, so we’ll try to sort that out,” Altman said in an interview with technology analysis platform Stratechery.

Recently, retail payments body National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and online payments gateway Razorpay collaborated with OpenAI to roll out agentic transactions on ChatGPT.

Tata Digital-backed online grocery platform BigBasket has also teamed up with ChatGPT to allow users to shop and pay for groceries using UPI, all without leaving the chatbot. This will let users browse, choose products, and make payments directly within the AI tool.

Altman-backed startups

In 2023, Sam Altman-backed Oklo agreed to go public in the US through a merger with his blank cheque firm in a deal that values the nuclear startup at $850 million.

In October 2023, AI startup Induced announced that it raised $2.3 million in a seed funding round led by Sam Altman and Indian venture capital fund Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India and SEA).