OpenAI, a leading nonprofit and renegade AI startup, has reportedly secured a $300 million share sale that values the company between $27 and $29 billion, according to TechCrunch. The news follows an earlier report from The Wall Street Journal that OpenAI had commenced a tender offer, and Friday’s announcement has now made it official.
The new funding round has attracted a range of investors, including old allies Tiger Global Management, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, plus never-before-seen backers Thrive Capital and K2 Global. OpenAI has yet to confirm the news, but the company continues to soar in the tech startup world, that in January was responsible for a third of all funding initiatives.
OpenAI’s successes pale in comparison to the staggering $10 billion raise it received from Microsoft in January, a deal that firmly established the company’s position in the tech sector. A number of other generative AI startups have followed suit, raking in a collective total of over $18 billion in just half a year – a figure that surpasses the $41 billion earned by the AI space in 2022 according to Crunchbase data.
The latest funding round for OpenAI is the biggest to-date for the space, followed by a $500 million raise from SandboxAQ, an AI and quantum computing startup from Palo Alto, and $350 million raised in a Series B funding round by Adept AI. The latter uses AI technology to change the way users interact with computers.
OpenAI is one of the premier AI startups in the world today, first established as a nonprofit research lab back in 2015. The company uses a selection of generative models to bridge techniques found in deep learning and reinforcement learning, among others, to create powerful, principled AI technologies. OpenAI is well-known for its chatbot GPT-3 and its breakthroughs in robotics, a field where the company strives to ensure that AI can function safely and securely.
