Highlights:

  • According to reports, the creator of ChatGPT intends to eliminate investor return caps and organize the for-profit division as a benefit corporation.
  • With an extra $6.6 billion in funds on hand, OpenAI will be able to keep putting expansion ahead of profitability for the foreseeable future.

The recent reports have confirmed that OpenAI raised USD 6.6 billion from investors for its AI research.

The developer of ChatGPT is valued at USD 157 billion following the raise, which is the largest venture capital funding round in history. That is almost twice as much as its previous value in a tender offer this year.

Leading the investment was Thrive Capital, whose contribution was estimated to be USD 1.6 billion. It is said that the venture capital firm contributed the majority of the USD 750 million, with the remainder coming from its partners. Before the end of the following year, Thrive Capital has the option to invest an additional USD one billion at a USD 150 billion valuation.

More than six additional investors joined the venture capital firm. Microsoft Corp., Nvidia Corp., SoftBank Group Corp., MGX, Altimeter Capital, Fidelity, Tiger Global, and Khosla Ventures were among the participants in the group. Khosla and SoftBank are said to have given USD 500 million apiece.

It is thought that the investment round is connected to an impending reorganization of OpenAI’s leadership team.

At the moment, OpenAI is a nonprofit organization that oversees its product engineering division with a for-profit division. According to reports, the creator of ChatGPT intends to eliminate investor return caps and organize the for-profit division as a benefit corporation. Reports suggest that if the reorganization is not finished in two years, participants in OpenAI’s most recent investment round may request a refund.

There are rumored to be further uncommon terms attached to the transaction. Notably, it has been stated that OpenAI asked the participants not to support competitor companies. This would make it more difficult for Anthropic PBC to raise capital, as it is rumored to be looking to raise as much as USD 40 billion.

Due to the fast-increasing demand for its AI services, OpenAI’s valuation doubled during its investment round. According to internal calculations, those services are on track to produce USD 3.7 billion in revenue this year and USD 11.6 billion throughout 2025.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has more than 250 million weekly users. Of those, about 11 million have paid for a subscription to ChatGPT Plus, a more advanced version of the chatbot offered by the AI provider with higher usage limitations. Furthermore, one million businesses have registered for ChatGPT’s business editions.

To continue growing, OpenAI is investing a lot of money: According to sources, the AI company could lose USD five billion this year. With an extra USD 6.6 billion in funds on hand, OpenAI will be able to keep putting expansion ahead of profitability for the foreseeable future. Additionally, the investment will ease the company’s burden of bearing the high expenditures associated with training large language models.

“The new funding will allow us to double down on our leadership in frontier AI research, increase compute capacity, and continue building tools that help people solve hard problems,” OpenAI stated.

According to recent rumors, the corporation may have more development plans in store than only AI software. It has been revealed in July that OpenAI and a chipmaker had considered working together to create a specially designed machine learning accelerator. It’s unclear if the developer of ChatGPT would sell the processor to other businesses or just use it to run its AI models.