ChatGPT Maker OpenAI Raises $6.6-B In Fresh Funding

OpenAI has announced having raised $6.6 billion in venture capital investments as part of a broader shift by the ChatGPT maker away from its nonprofit roots, Matt O’Brien reported for the Associated Press (AP).

The funding gives OpenAI a market value of $157 billion. I Photo: Focal Foto Flickr

Led by venture capital firm Thrive Capital, the funding round was backed by tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia, and SoftBank, according to a source familiar with the funding who was not authorized to speak about it publicly.

The investment represents one of the largest fundraising rounds in U.S. history and is the biggest in the past 17 years that doesn’t include money from a single deep-pocketed company, according to PitchBook, which tracks venture capital investments.

Microsoft gave OpenAI a significant boost last year with a $10 billion investment in exchange for a large stake in the company’s future growth, following a strategy similar to that of tobacco giant Altria Group, which invested $12.8 billion into the vaping startup Juul in 2018.

OpenAI said 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 added that the funding gives it a market value of $157 billion and will “accelerate progress on our mission,” as reported by Michael Liedtke and Kelvin Chan for AP.