The company behind ChatGPT is now worth $300 billion.
OpenAI has secured $40 billion in a new investment round led by SoftBank, boosting its valuation to $300 billion. This marks the largest funding round ever for a private tech company, as reported by CNBC.
The company will receive an initial $10 billion, with SoftBank contributing $7.5 billion and an additional $2.5 billion coming from a group of investors, according to Bloomberg. The remaining $30 billion is expected to be delivered by the end of the year, but this is contingent on OpenAI officially transitioning to a for-profit model by that time. If that doesn’t happen, they could potentially lose a quarter of the deal.
This funding comes shortly after OpenAI unveiled Stargate, a $500 billion partnership with SoftBank, Oracle, and the Abu Dhabi fund MGX, aimed at developing large-scale AI data centers over the next four years. The company has been on a roll lately: CEO Sam Altman shared that OpenAI gained 1 million users in just one hour, largely due to a new feature called Images in ChatGPT, which has gone viral for generating Studio Ghibli-inspired AI art. Additionally, Altman announced that a new open-weight language model with reasoning capabilities will be released in the coming months. The funding announcement also highlighted that ChatGPT serves 500 million users weekly.
Even though the startup has experienced tremendous growth thanks to ChatGPT, it’s still burning through a lot of cash. Bloomberg recently shared that the company anticipates generating $12.7 billion in revenue this year, a significant increase from last year’s $3.7 billion in annual recurring revenue. However, the report also indicates that OpenAI doesn’t expect to achieve positive cash flow until 2029, when they project a staggering $125 billion in revenue.
In its funding announcement, OpenAI highlighted its mission to create “AGI that benefits all of humanity.” Altman has made it clear that achieving this vision will require substantial resources—computing power, energy, global infrastructure, and, of course, a massive amount of funding. According to the startup, this latest funding round brings it closer to that goal.
