Artificial intelligence giant OpenAI closed $122 billion in committed capital for a post-money valuation of $852 billion, a round that eclipses anything raised in private markets and cements the company by far as the most valuable startup in history.
Funding was provided by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, with continued participation from Microsoft. SoftBank was co-led alongside 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 all participated.
For the first time, OpenAI opened participation to individual investors through banking channels, raising more than $3 billion in this tranche alone.
OpenAI said it generates $2 billion in revenue per month, up from $1 billion per quarter at the end of 2024. ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million subscribers. The company claims 6x more monthly web visits and mobile sessions than 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 achieve consumer parity by the end of 2026. The company’s APIs process more than 15 billion tokens per minute. Codex, its coding agent, serves more than 2 million weekly users, a 5-fold increase 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. This facility had still not been used as of March 31.
The company has defined the increase around compute as a strategic moat. Its infrastructure strategy now covers cloud partnerships with Microsoft, Oracle, AWS, CoreWeave and Google Cloud, silicon through Nvidia, AMD, AWS Trainium, Cerebras, and its own custom chip with Broadcom, as well as data centers through Oracle, SBE and SoftBank.
At the same time, the company announced that it was building a “unified AI superapplication” that would combine ChatGPT, Codex, navigation and agent 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 business to translate model improvements directly into adoption.
The $852 billion valuation puts OpenAI above all but a handful of public companies in the world. For context, this is roughly the market capitalization of Berkshire Hathaway, and larger than that of Visa, JPMorgan Chase or Samsung.
