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Venture capital firm Thrive Capital will invest at additional $1bn next year if OpenAI reaches a revenue goal.
OpenAI has raised $6.6bn in its latest funding round, reaching a valuation of $157bn – almost double its previous valuation.
The funding round was led by venture capital firm Thrive Capital and included big name investors Nvidia, SoftBank, Fidelity, Khosla Ventures and the start-up’s biggest supporter since 2019, Microsoft. While Apple was reported to have dropped out of investing in the round just days ago.
Thrive Capital committed $1.2bn and negotiated a further investment of $1bn next year at the same valuation if the ChatGPT maker hits a revenue goal, according to Reuters. OpenAI expects $5bn in losses and $3.7bn in revenue this year, but hopes to earn $11.6bn in sales next year, CNBC reported last month.
“We aim to make advanced intelligence a widely accessible resource,” OpenAI said in a blogpost. “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.”
Funding into OpenAI has come in the form of convertible notes, with a conversion into equity depending on the successful structural change of the company – from a not-for-profit to a for-profit.
The announcement of OpenAI’s transformation into a for-profit company came just last week, when it was also announced that CEO Sam Altman would receive equity in the company for the first time. However, Altman clarified that he will not receive a “giant equity stake” in the company.
On the same day, the company’s long-term chief technology officer, and interim CEO during Altman’s brief ousting last year, Mira Murati announced that she is leaving. Research VP Barret Zoph and chief research officer Bob McGrew also announced they are leaving the company.
Just three of the company’s original 11 founders remain at the company. Earlier this week, co-founder Durk Kingma followed a string of former OpenAI alumni to join rival start-up Anthropic.
Last month, OpenAI shared a preview of its latest large language model focused on “complex reasoning” called the o1 model. Available to ChatGPT subscribers and the company’s “trusted API users”, 01 is capable of “thinking” for a longer time, improving its reasoning ability, the company said.
While yesterday, OpenAI’s collaborator Microsoft launched a beta feature on its AI assistant Copilot called Think Deeper, an AI tool that tackles challenging questions requiring deeper analysis.
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