ChatGPT
Draft, analyze files and work through questions in a conversational workspace.
OpenAI Funding History
OpenAI develops general-purpose AI models and applications, including GPT, ChatGPT and Sora. Its business spans consumer software, enterprise products and model access for developers, connecting research on language and generative media with tools used in everyday work.
Company Overview
Founded 2015 · San Francisco, California
Official WebsiteOpenAI Funding Timeline
Series G
$122B · $852B valuation
OpenAI described the total as committed capital. Its announcement did not specify how much had already been paid in.
Led by SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures. Participation included Amazon, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital.
Source · openai.com ↗Series F
$40B · $300B valuation
OpenAI said the financing would expand compute capacity for research and for ChatGPT.
Led by SoftBank. Participation included Microsoft, Coatue, Altimeter Capital, Thrive Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, MGX.
Source · reuters.com ↗Series E
$6.6B · $157B valuation
OpenAI separately established a $4 billion credit facility. That borrowing capacity was in addition to the financing announced for this round.
Led by Thrive Capital. Participation included Microsoft, NVIDIA, SoftBank, MGX, Altimeter Capital, Fidelity Investments, Tiger Global, Khosla Ventures.
Source · reuters.com ↗Secondary Tender
$300M · $29B valuation
TechCrunch reported the venture investment separately from the Microsoft deal that closed that January.
Led by Thrive Capital. Participation included Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, K2 Global.
Source · techcrunch.com ↗Microsoft Extended Commitment
$10B · $29B valuation
Microsoft announced a multiyear investment alongside plans to expand its supercomputing support. It did not disclose how the investment was divided between cash and other support.
Led by Microsoft.
Source · cnbc.com ↗Microsoft Partnership Investment
$1B
The investment was announced alongside a cloud-computing partnership.
Led by Microsoft.
Source · openai.com ↗Founding Commitments
$1B
Founding nonprofit commitments are distinct from paid-in company equity.
Participation included Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, AWS, Infosys.
Source · openai.com ↗
OpenAI Founding Team
OpenAI launched in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization with Sam Altman and Elon Musk as co-chairs. Its founding group also included John Schulman, Andrej Karpathy, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Durk Kingma, and Pamela Vagata.
- Greg Brockman became OpenAI’s CTO after serving as CTO at Stripe.
- Ilya Sutskever led OpenAI’s research at launch after working on deep learning at Google Brain.
- Wojciech Zaremba was a founding research scientist after working at Google Brain and Facebook AI.
OpenAI Products
Delegate code changes and reviews from a terminal, editor or cloud session.
OpenAI API
Embed language, reasoning and multimodal models in your own software.
Ask ChatGPT about the page you are on or have it carry out tasks across sites.
Build interactive voice experiences with streaming audio input and output.
OpenAI Company Development
ChatGPT Gives OpenAI a Direct Route to Users
OpenAI began as a nonprofit research organization and later adopted a structure that could raise outside capital. It moved from releasing models and providing API access to operating consumer and business products, with ChatGPT becoming a direct way to use models without building an application.
OpenAI Competitive Landscape
Coding Inside a Repository
Codex and Claude Code give developers a way to delegate work inside existing repositories. Their overlap is clearest on a multi-file change: teams can test how each tool navigates the codebase, applies edits and leaves the result for review. The relevant benchmark is a task from the team’s own repository.
FAQ
Why did OpenAI's earliest capital arrive as pledges rather than priced rounds?
Because it began as a nonprofit: of the founding US$1B pledge only about US$130M arrived as cash, and a charity cannot sell equity. Each structural step fixed that — the 2019 capped-profit recap unlocked Microsoft's US$1B, the October 2025 public-benefit reincorporation staged the public markets. Anthropic ran the sequence in reverse: born a C-corp in 2021, S-1 filed within five years.
How much of the record US$122B round was actually firm at close?
Less than the headline: Amazon's commitment is up to US$50B, of which US$35B is conditional on IPO and AGI milestones, so the true size moves with OpenAI's own milestones. Nvidia and SoftBank at US$30B each anchor the firm portion, and the US$4.7B revolving credit facility was left undrawn at close — no comparable private round has relied this heavily on future events to complete its own total.
Why do Microsoft, SoftBank and Amazon all sit in OpenAI's register without one dominating?
Because each anchors a different dependency: Microsoft is the compute partner dating to 2019; SoftBank co-led the two largest rounds (US$40B in 2025, US$122B in 2026) as the single biggest backer; Amazon arrived last with up to US$50B tied to milestones. Anthropic pairs two hyperscalers as suppliers; OpenAI needed three capital partners — a wider surface, but no single counterparty controls it.
What does ~US$2B a month of revenue mean against a ~US$600B compute program?
That the funding gap is structural: US$2B monthly annualizes to about US$24B, while the reported compute program through 2030 totals roughly US$600B — some 25 years of current revenue. That arithmetic is why rounds are sized in tens of billions, why the revolver sat undrawn, and why Amazon's conditional US$35B keys to IPO and AGI events rather than revenue targets.
What is the difference between Microsoft's 2019 US$1B and 2023 US$10B commitments?
The first bought the relationship, the second scaled it: 2019's US$1B paired equity with exclusive Azure compute when OpenAI had no product; January 2023's US$10B — largely Azure compute — landed as ChatGPT's trajectory emerged and doubled the reported valuation to ~US$29B. SoftBank's US$40B in March 2025 then set a record OpenAI itself broke with the US$122B round a year later.
Can I add a compute commitment to an equity round to estimate OpenAI's cash raised?
No. A compute commitment may describe future purchases or access rather than cash invested for shares. OpenAI-related announcements can discuss funding and infrastructure in the same story. Count only the disclosed financing component and retain conditions attached to any staged commitments.