Retail investors are now part of OpenAI’s cap table, investing $3 billion in latest $122 billion funding round

The world’s most valuable AI startup, OpenAI, has closed its latest funding round, securing $122 billion at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. The round was led by existing investors Amazon, NVIDIA, SoftBank, and Microsoft. SoftBank co-led the round alongside Andreessen Horowitz, D. E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, and TPG. This follows the company’s February announcement, when it raised $110 billion in new investment at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, including $30 billion each from SoftBank and NVIDIA, and $50 billion from Amazon. 

The company had also signed a strategic partnership with Amazon to secure the next generation inference compute with NVIDIA and had indicated that more investors were expected to join.   

Being the fastest tech platform to reach $100 million users globally, “Within a year of launching ChatGPT, we reached $1 billion in revenue. By the end of 2024, we were generating $1 billion in revenue per quarter. We are now generating $2 billion in revenue per month. At this stage, we are growing revenue four times faster than the companies who defined the Internet and mobile eras, including Alphabet and Meta,” the company said in its release.    

While the current funding round also saw institutional participation from the likes of Altimeter, Appaloosa LP, ARK Invest, affiliated funds of BlackRock, Blackstone, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, Dragoneer, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Goanna Capital, Insight Partners, The Paragon Group, Sands Capital, Sequoia Capital, the company for the first time has also opened itself up for retail participation. 

“For the first time, we extended participation to investors through bank channels, raising over $3 billion from individual investors. Today, we’re also announcing that OpenAI will be included in several exchange-traded funds managed by ARK Invest, further broadening ownership and giving more people the opportunity to share in the upside economics of OpenAI and the AI era,” the statement added.  

According to OpenAI, on the consumer AI side, ChatGPT currently has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million subscribers. Its search usage has nearly tripled in a year, with its ads pilot reaching more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in under six weeks. OpenAI added that nearly 40% of its revenue now comes from enterprise clients. With each new generation of infrastructure improving its models, reducing the cost to serve each token, and lowering the cost per unit of intelligence, the company expects a compounding effect. 

"Nvidia remains the foundation of our infrastructure. Our training fleet and the majority of our inference stack continue to run on Nvidia GPUs, and with this round, we are deepening that partnership as we scale,” the company further stated.