Artificial intelligence giant OpenAI has completed $122 billion in committed capital and has a post-money valuation of $852 billion. This round of financing dwarfs the funds raised in the private market and significantly solidifies the company’s status as the most valuable startup in history.
The financing is backed by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, with continued participation from Microsoft. SoftBank co-led the round along with a16z, DE Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price.
The list of investors reads like a who’s who of global capital – BlackRock, Blackstone, Fidelity, Sequoia, Temasek, Coatue and ARK Invest are all involved.
For the first time, OpenAI opened participation to individual investors through banking channels, and more than $3 billion was raised in this segment alone.
OpenAI said it is generating $2 billion in monthly revenue, up from $1 billion per quarter by the end of 2024. ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million subscribers. The company claims six times the number of monthly web visits and mobile sessions as the next largest AI app, and four times the time spent on all other AI apps combined.
Enterprises currently account for more than 40% of revenue and are expected to equal consumers by the end of 2026. The company’s API handles more than 15 billion tokens per minute. Its coding agency, Codex, serves more than 2 million users every week and has grown fivefold in three months.
OpenAI also expanded its revolving credit line to approximately $4.7 billion, with support from JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and others. As of March 31, the loan had not been drawn down.
The company views financing around computing as a strategic moat. Its infrastructure strategy now spans cloud partnerships with Microsoft, Oracle, AWS, CoreWeave and Google Cloud, silicon provision through Nvidia, AMD, AWS Trainium, Cerebras, as well as its own custom silicon in partnership with Broadcom, and data center provision through Oracle, SBE and SoftBank.
At the same time, the company said it is building a “unified AI super application” that combines ChatGPT, Codex, browsing and proxy functions into a single product.
The proposition is that as models become more powerful, the bottleneck shifts from intelligence to usability, and a single interface allows companies to translate model improvements directly into adoption.
OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation puts all but a handful of publicly traded companies in the world at the top. For context, that’s roughly equivalent to Berkshire Hathaway’s market capitalization and larger than Visa, JPMorgan Chase or Samsung.