OpenAI just closed a historic funding round with a $6.6 billion investment at a $157 billion valuation as it continues to pursue its mission of building artificial general intelligence, according to a company blog post. .
The funding round was led by Thrive Capital, which invested $1 billion, according to the Financial Times. Thrive was also reported to have entered into a special deal (not available to other investors) that would allow it to invest an additional $1 billion next year at the same valuation if the AI company meets its revenue goals. The news agency reported.
These funds appear to be conditional on OpenAI undergoing a rumored restructuring as a for-profit company. The company’s for-profit arm is now overseen by a nonprofit research institute, and investors’ returns are capped at 100x. If OpenAI doesn’t restructure as a commercial company within two years, investors could seek refunds, Axios reported. Last week, Reuters reported that the company is considering becoming a public benefit corporation (like Anthropic).
In an unusual move, OpenAI also asked investors to avoid supporting rival startups such as Anthropic Inc. and Elon Musk’s xAI, the Financial Times reported. It’s worth noting that OpenAI’s latest funding round barely surpasses xAI, which raised $6 billion in May.
This funding round values OpenAI at approximately 40 times its reported revenue, an unprecedented number that highlights just how hyped AI is in Silicon Valley. The New York Times reported that OpenAI’s monthly revenue reached $300 million in August, and the company expects annual revenue to be about $3.7 billion this year (next year’s revenue will reach $11.6 billion). (I estimate that this is the case).
Those billions of dollars will be spent on the incredibly expensive task of training AI frontier models. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said an AI model that would cost $1 billion to train is in development, and a $100 billion model is not far away. For OpenAI, which wants to build a series of “inference” models, these costs are only going to mount, making new funding rounds like this one important.