Artificial intelligence giant OpenAI has closed $122 billion in committed capital at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, a round that eclipses anything raised in the private markets and cements the company as the most valuable startup in history by a wide margin.
Financing was provided by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, with continued participation from Microsoft. SoftBank co-led 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 participated.
For the first time, OpenAI opened participation to individual investors through banking channels, raising more than $3 billion from that tranche alone.
OpenAI said it is generating $2 billion in revenue per month, 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 6x the monthly web visits and mobile sessions of the next largest AI app, and 4x the total time spent of all other AI apps combined.
The company now accounts for more than 40% of revenue and is on track to reach consumer parity by the end of 2026. The company’s APIs process more than 15 billion tokens per minute. Codex, its encryption broker, serves more than 2 million weekly users, five times more in three months.
OpenAI also expanded its revolving credit facility to approximately $4.7 billion, backed by JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and others. That line of credit remains unused as of March 31.
The company framed the surge around computing as a strategic moat. Its infrastructure strategy now encompasses cloud partnerships with Microsoft, Oracle, AWS, CoreWeave and Google Cloud, silicon through Nvidia, AMD, AWS Trainium, Cerebras and its own custom chip with Broadcom, and data centers through Oracle, SBE and SoftBank.
Meanwhile, the company said it is creating a “unified AI super app” that would combine ChatGPT, Codex, navigation and agency capabilities into a single product.
The argument is that as models become more capable, the bottleneck shifts from intelligence to usability, and a single surface allows the company to translate model improvements directly into adoption.
The $852 billion valuation puts OpenAI ahead of all but a handful of public companies globally. For context, that’s about the market cap of Berkshire Hathaway and larger than Visa, JPMorgan Chase, or Samsung.
