Dallas-based AI startup MythWorx has closed a $5 million seed funding round led by Eagle Venture Fund IV, Eagle Freedom Fund I, and Eagle Freedom Fund II, along with investment from other leading angel investors. The funding gives MythWorx a valuation of $100 million, the company said.

MythWorx recently emerged from stealth, saying its compact model can outperform LLMs hundreds of times its size without pretraining. Last month, Dallas Innovates wrote about the company’s newly named CEO, Jason Williamson, and explored how MythWorx is betting its human-inspired AI architecture can challenge the LLM status quo—and bring AGI closer to market.

A next-generation AI startup with a “unique AI/AGI construct and architecture and pioneering reasoning capabilities,” Mythworx said the valuation is significantly higher than other seed-stage AI startups, reflecting the “groundbreaking” reduction in compute and power needs and human-like reasoning capabilities presented by MythWorx’s model, Echo Ego v2.

“This funding milestone validates the strength of our technology and the market’s understanding and support of our new brain-modeled approach to AI,” Williamson said. “Our mission is to deliver AI that is smarter, faster and dramatically more efficient than traditional LLMs, to redefine what’s possible with true reasoning capabilities. And we’ve delivered—with our model representing a ‘black swan’ moment for AI.”

The startup said that Echo Ego v2 outperforms traditional large language models (LLMs) as it requires one-tenth of the power resources when completing tasks and answers questions up to eight times faster.

‘True reasoning principles’

MythWorx said its model uses true reasoning principles and does not require pretraining to perform well on benchmarking, compared to LLMs that frequently use pattern recognition or memorized strategies during pretraining to score capably.

The funding will further support MythWorx’s growth by enabling hiring for key roles throughout the company, adding products and enhanced capabilities, and streamlining and accelerating the company’s go-to-market strategy, the company said.

Despite its smaller size, MythWorx’s model outperforms models hundreds of times larger across a wide range of tasks, the company said—adding that it performs well without pretraining, retries, or chain-of-thought prompting.

MythWorx said it recently supported its claims through MMLU-Pro benchmarking testing. The company said it outperformed DeepSeek-R1 and many other LLMs during the benchmarking, without prior fine tuning. That contrasts with traditional LLMs that rely on multiple attempts or chain-of-thought reasoning to refine answers, MythWorx said.

“This financing allows us to move forward quickly with our go-to-market strategy of licensing our unique AGI capability to big tech, government, and Department of War sectors that have long anticipated the advent of true reasoning,” Wade Myers, co-founder and chairman of MythWorx, said in a statement.

Wes Lyons, general partner at Eagle Venture Fund, said the funding will allow MythWorx to advance its mission.

“We’re thrilled to lead this seed round and partner with MythWorx,” Lyons said. “Their breakthrough technology has the potential to redefine AI, and we believe their exceptional team has the vision and execution capabilities to build a category-defining company. We couldn’t be more excited to support them at this early stage of their journey.”

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R E A D   N E X T

The fund builds on the success of the $18 million Eagle Freedom Fund I, which has invested in 20 high-growth companies delivering measurable impact across healthcare, law enforcement, technology, and frontline response, the firm said.

The fund is said to be “the first investment fund in the world” dedicated to investing in tech innovation to fight human trafficking. “It’s an honor to partner with so many amazing leaders in our mission to protect the most vulnerable,” said former NFL QB Tim Tebow, a general partner in the fund.

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