OpenAI

OpenAI is a AI Model Development startup based in San Francisco, California, United States that has raised $180B in venture capital across 5 funding rounds since 2015. The company reached Late Stage stage in July 2019 with a $1B round led by Microsoft. OpenAI's investor base includes 16 institutional funds, with Microsoft leading the most recent equity round.

OpenAI is an American AI research organization founded in December 2015 in San Francisco, California by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman, Elon Musk, and others. Originally structured as a nonprofit, the company transitioned to a capped-profit model in 2019 and became a public benefit corporation in 2025. OpenAI's core research focuses on developing safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence, producing a succession of frontier language models — from GPT-2 and GPT-3 to GPT-4 and GPT-5 — that set benchmarks for reasoning, coding, and multimodal understanding. Its consumer product ChatGPT became the fastest-growing application in history, reaching 100 million users within two months of launch in November 2022. OpenAI's model API powers thousands of enterprise applications worldwide, while DALL-E and Sora lead in image and video generation respectively. In 2024 the company reported annualized revenue exceeding $3.4 billion, growing to over $13 billion by 2025. OpenAI has raised over $180 billion across 13 funding rounds, reaching a valuation of $852 billion as of April 2026 — making it the world's most valuable private company. In May 2026 it launched the OpenAI Deployment Company, a $4 billion PE-backed joint venture with TPG, SoftBank, Bain Capital, and Brookfield to accelerate enterprise AI adoption. As of 2026, the company employs approximately 4,500 people.

Lead investors

Co-investors

• startup_fundraisingOpenAI launches professional services business with $4B investment
• startup_fundraisingTPG, Brookfield, Advent, and Bain Capital back OpenAI's $4bn-plus deployment joint venture