Artificial-intelligence tech company OpenAI said it has raised $6.6 billion in new funding, giving it a massive post-money valuation of $157 billion, almost double its previous reported valuation of $80 billion earlier this year.
The new round of funding was led by venture-capital firm Thrive Capital, with additional investors including Microsoft, Nvidia, SoftBank, Fidelity, Khosla Ventures, Altimeter Capital, United Arab Emirates-based MGX and Tiger Global. In 2024, OpenAI is projecting a $5 billion net loss on $3.7 billion in revenue, CNBC reported. Next year, the company is targeting $11.6 billion in revenue, per the report.
“We are making progress on our mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” OpenAI said in a statement announcing the funding. “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 currently has about 1,700 employees, after hiring more than 1,000 since the beginning of the year. 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 said in a blog post Wednesday.
“We aim to make advanced intelligence a widely accessible resource,” the company said in the blog post. “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.”
San Francisco-based OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit organization by CEO Sam Altman, Elon Musk (who is no longer affiliated with OpenAI and has launched his own artificial-intelligence company, xAI) and others.
Last week, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announced that she is leaving after six and half years, writing in a message to company staffers that “I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.” Shortly afterward, OpenAI chief research officer Bob McGrew and Barret Zoph, VP of post-training research, also said they are leaving the company.
Earlier this year, OpenAI was at the center of a controversy involving actor Scarlett Johansson, who said she turned down the company’s request for her to reprise her role in the movie “Her” and lend her voice to ChatGPT — and was subsequently “shocked” and “angered” that the company went ahead and used a voice that sounded very similar to hers anyway. Johansson, in a statement provided to Variety, said her lawyers contacted OpenAI to have the voice of Sky, one of the new voices in the GPT-4o chatbot that sounded like her voice, pulled down.
OpenAI is one of Apple’s key partners for new AI features that it’s launching for iPhone 16 and other devices. OpenAI also has inked deals with publishers and news organizations — to license content to train its AI models and feature their content in search results — including Conde Nast, the Associated Press, Axel Springer, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, LeMonde, NewsCorp, Prisa Media, Time and Vox Media. In another camp are the New York Times and other newspapers, which have sued OpenAI as well as Microsoft, alleging the tech companies engaged in copyright infringement by using the publishers’ content to train their AI systems.
(Pictured above: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman)
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