OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has closed the biggest venture capital round ever.
The startup announced that it raised $6.6 billion in a funding round that values OpenAI at $157 billion post-money.
According to Crunchbase, OpenAI has raised a total of $17.9 billion, with the new funding led by previous investor Thrive Capital.
The New York Times reports that Thrive has invested about $1.33 billion, with an exclusive right to invest an additional $1 billion at the same valuation (through 2025).
Participating in the fundraising were Microsoft, Nvidia, SoftBank, Fidelity, MGX, Khosla Ventures, and Altimeter Capital.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Nvidia promised $100 million, SoftBank contributed $500 million, and Microsoft reportedly contributed slightly less than $1 billion.
“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,” the company wrote in a 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,” it added.
There might be strange strings connected. Recently, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI asked investors to avoid backing rival startups such as Anthropic and xAI.
The best-funded AI startup globally was already OpenAI. But the enormous new tranche places the San Francisco-based business in a class by itself.
The previously mentioned xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture, raised over $6 billion earlier this year, but at a valuation far smaller than OpenAI’s ($24 billion post-money). The capital war chests of prominent AI ventures Cohere and Mistral are roughly $1 billion, while chief rival Anthropic has amassed just over half of OpenAI’s total ($9.7 billion) since its founding.
