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OpenAIMission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity
Valuation (Mar 2026 round)
$852B
+70% from $500B (Oct 2025)
Annualized Revenue (Feb 2026)
~$25B
~$2B/month; up from ~$20B end-2025
ChatGPT Weekly Active Users
~900M+
early 2026; up from ~800M Oct 2025
Stargate JV Commitment
$500B / 4-yr
With SoftBank, Oracle, MGX; Texas Site 1 under construction
Total raised: ~$180B+ (incl. 2026 round) · Latest valuation: $852B
| Round | Date | Amount | Valuation | Key Investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Founding pledge | Dec 2015 | $1B (pledged) | - | Sam AltmanElon MuskReid HoffmanPeter Thiel+1 more |
| Microsoft Partnership I | Jul 2019 | $1B | - | Microsoft |
| Microsoft Partnership II | Jan 2023 | $10B (reported) | - | Microsoft |
| Secondary Tender | Apr 2023 | - | $29B | SequoiaThrive CapitalTiger Global |
| Tender Offer | Feb 2024 | - | $86B | Thrive Capital |
| Series (Primary) | Oct 2024 | $6.6B | $157B | Thrive Capital (lead)MicrosoftNVIDIASoftBank+1 more |
| SoftBank-Led Round | Mar 2025 | $40B (committed) | $300B | SoftBank (lead)MicrosoftCoatueAltimeter+1 more |
| Employee Tender | Oct 2025 | - | $500B | ThriveSoftBankDragoneerT. Rowe Price |
| Primary Round | Mar 2026 | $122B | $852B | SoftBankNVIDIAThrive CapitalMGX |
| Product | Type | Status |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Consumer chat (Free / Plus / Pro / Team / Enterprise / Edu / Gov) | GA. ~900M weekly active users (early 2026) |
| GPT-5 | Unified frontier model (text, vision, voice, reasoning) | GA (Aug 2025) |
| o3 / o4-mini | Reasoning model family | GA via API and ChatGPT |
| Sora 2 | Text-to-video generation | GA via sora.com (Sep 2025) |
| DALL-E 3 | Text-to-image generation | GA, integrated into ChatGPT |
| Realtime API / Voice Mode | Low-latency speech-to-speech | GA via API |
| Operator / Agent Mode | Browser-using autonomous agent | GA in ChatGPT Plus/Pro (2025) |
| Codex (new) | Cloud software engineering agent | GA in ChatGPT (May 2025) |
| OpenAI API | Developer platform (models, fine-tuning, embeddings, batch, files) | GA |
| Stargate Datacenters | Infrastructure JV with SoftBank + Oracle + MGX | Under construction (Texas Site 1) |
Exclusive Azure relationship through 2030 (per renegotiated terms); cumulative ~$13B+ investment; revenue share. Right of first refusal on new compute capacity post-2030 removed in 2025 amendments.
Stargate co-lead; ~4.5 GW Texas datacenter cluster contracted Jul 2025 (reported $300B over 5 years per WSJ).
Led $40B March 2025 round; Stargate co-lead with $19B initial commitment.
Primary GPU supplier (H100, H200, GB200, GB300); NVIDIA-led $100B compute commitment to OpenAI Sep 2025 (Vera Rubin systems).
6 GW MI300/MI400 deployment agreement Oct 2025; equity warrants granted to OpenAI.
ChatGPT integrated into Siri and Apple Intelligence (iOS 18.2, Dec 2024).
Member of Frontier Model Forum; participates in NIST AI Safety Institute consortium.
Co-developing OpenAI custom inference ASIC; volume production targeted 2026.
Founded as nonprofit by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba
First generative pre-trained transformer published
1.5B parameter model; staged release over concerns of misuse
Created OpenAI LP under nonprofit parent; enables outside investment
175B parameter model; API launched in private beta
Hits 1M users in 5 days, 100M in 2 months; fastest consumer product to that scale
Multimodal model with image input; powers ChatGPT Plus
Sam Altman fired Nov 17, reinstated Nov 22; board reconstituted
Omni-modal model with native voice; free-tier upgrade
First reasoning-focused frontier model (Strawberry); chain-of-thought trained
$500B 4-year US datacenter buildout with SoftBank, Oracle, MGX; Texas Site 1 underway
Unified model replacing GPT-4o, o3, and routing logic; default in ChatGPT
Employee tender doubles March's $300B valuation in 7 months
Closes a $122B primary round at an $852B valuation, among the largest private financings ever and widely read as a pre-IPO step
Largest AI lab by revenue. Approximately $13B annualized run-rate revenue (mid-2025) from a mix of ChatGPT consumer subscriptions, ChatGPT Enterprise / Team, the OpenAI API, and Microsoft Azure OpenAI revenue share. ChatGPT reaches roughly 800M weekly active users (late 2025). Builder of the GPT family (GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, GPT-5, o-series reasoning models) and Sora video. Microsoft is the dominant compute and distribution partner; SoftBank led the $40B March 2025 primary round at $300B. OpenAI was founded in 2015, is headquartered in San Francisco, CA and employs ~3,500.
OpenAI has raised ~$180B+ (incl. 2026 round) in total at a $852B valuation, based on the funding rounds Sterling tracks.
Sterling groups OpenAI in the AI Software sector, alongside Anthropic (private), SpaceXAI (private), Mistral AI (private), DeepSeek (private), Cohere (private) and AI21 Labs (private).
If you are researching OpenAI, also look at Alibaba (Qwen), Tencent (Hunyuan) and Baidu (Ernie). You can compare all of them side by side or browse the full AI Software sector on Sterling.
