OpenAI’s $6.5 billion funding round has been the cause of speculation for weeks, and now, the AI firm has confirmed the development. OpenAI confirmed that it has closed its latest (and successful) funding round, wherein it raised $6.6 billion and elevated its valuation to an impressive $157 billion. For comparison, OpenAI was valued at $80 billion earlier this year.
“We are making progress on our mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Every week, over 250 million people around the world use ChatGPT to enhance their work, creativity, and learning. Across industries, businesses are improving productivity and operations, and developers are leveraging our platform to create a new generation of applications. And we’re only getting started,” OpenAI noted. This round of funding is one of the largest private investments so far.
The new round of funding was led by venture capital firm Thrive Capital (which confirms prior reports on the matter). The funding round also included the participation from several other prominent investors, including Microsoft, Nvidia, SoftBank, Khosla Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Fidelity, and MGX. With this, OpenAI has raised a total of $17.9 billion across funding rounds ever since it was founded.
OpenAI notes that the proceeds from the funding round will enable it to “double down on our leadership in frontier AI research, increase compute capacity, and continue building tools that help people solve hard problems. We aim to make advanced intelligence a widely accessible resource. We’re grateful to our investors for their trust in us, and we look forward to working with our partners, developers, and the broader community to shape an AI-powered ecosystem and future that benefits everyone. By collaborating with key partners, including the U.S. and allied governments, we can unlock this technology’s full potential.”
This is good news for OpenAI, especially since it comes on the heels of a tumultuous period for the ChatGPT maker. November saw the firm get into hot waters when Sam Altman, the CEO, was ousted for a while before being reinstated shortly after (which led to the departure of leading researcher Ilya Sutskever). And last month, OpenAI saw several of its top leadership part ways with the company, including Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, Vice President of Research Barret Zoph, and and Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew.
The company also reported an impressive $300 million in revenue last month, marking a staggering increase of 1,700% from the previous year, and expects to rein in $11.6 billion in sales in 2025. Not all is good news, though, and the ChatGPT-maker also expects to incur a loss of nearly $5 billion for the current fiscal year (especially since a lot of expenditure is being made towards training and deployment of the firm’s advanced AI models).
