The A.I. start-up’s valuation has risen by more than $70 billion in nine months.
OpenAI said on Wednesday that it had completed a $6.6 billion fund-raising deal that more than doubles the high-profile company’s valuation from just nine months ago.
The new fund-raising round, led by the investment firm Thrive Capital, values OpenAI at $157 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the deal. Microsoft, the chipmaker Nvidia, the tech conglomerate SoftBank, the United Arab Emirates investment firm MGX and others are also putting money into OpenAI.
The company started the A.I. boom in 2022 with the release of its online chatbot ChatGPT, sparking a race to invest in start-ups that develop similar technology. And its latest investment round indicates that the tech industry’s excitement over artificial intelligence remains strong, despite concerns about the effectiveness and the safety of the technology.
Investments in A.I. start-ups cooled earlier this year as several were essentially swallowed by the tech giants Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which are building technology similar to what OpenAI has been working on. But OpenAI’s profile has given it a major head start. Its revenues are rising quickly, but it is losing billions of dollars because of the unusually high cost of building and running A.I. technologies like ChatGPT.
Just nine months ago, OpenAI was valued at $70 billion. The company now has about 1,700 employees, after adding more than 1,000 workers in that period.
OpenAI expects about $3.7 billion in sales this year, according to financial documents reviewed by The New York Times. But it also expects to lose roughly $5 billion after paying for costs related to running its services and other expenses, according to an analysis of the documents by a financial professional.