OpenAI raises $40B at $300B valuation

ChatGPT-maker OpenAIhas raised $40 billion in a new funding round, pushing its post-money valuation to $300 billion.

According to a Bloomberg report, the round is being led by SoftBank Group, with Masayoshi Son’s firm contributing $7.5 billion. An additional $2.5 billion will be invested from a syndicate of investors, it added. 

The funding also saw participation from Microsoft Corporation, Coatue Management, Altimeter Capital Management, and Thrive Capital, stated a source familiar with the matter on condition of anonymity.

“Today, we’re announcing new funding—$40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation, which enables us to push the frontiers of AI research even further, scale our compute infrastructure, and deliver increasingly powerful tools for the 500 million people who use ChatGPT every week,” read the company’s blog. 

Moreover, a second tranche of $30 billion is expected to be invested in OpenAI by the end of 2025, comprising $22.5 billion from SoftBank and $7.5 billion from a syndicate of investors, the report added. 

“We’re excited to be working in partnership with SoftBank Group—few companies understand how to scale transformative technology like they do. Their support will help us continue building AI systems that drive scientific discovery, enable personalised education, enhance human creativity, and pave the way toward AGI that benefits all of humanity,” it added. 

Last week, OpenAI rolled out its native image generation feature to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users globally, letting users generate photos into Studio Ghibli-style artwork. 

On April 1, the feature was made available to all users for free, which made the company draw one million users in just one hour. 

“The ChatGPT launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments I'd ever seen, and we added one million users in five days. We added one million users in the last hour,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI in a post on X.