OpenAI secures an extra $10 billion in record funding round, CFO Friar says
OpenAI has raised another $10 billion from investors as part of its historic funding round, CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday.
The new capital brings OpenAI’s record fundraising to “north of $120 billion,” Friar said in an interview on “Mad Money.” This far exceeds the ChatGPT creator’s initial goal of $100 billion. OpenAI announced its first tranche of investment in late February, likely seen as the last private fundraising before a potential blockbuster IPO.
Andreessen Horowitz, DE Shaw Ventures, MGX, KPI And T. Rowe Price According to Friar, there are participants in the new $10 billion commitment. Especially, Microsofta long-time investor in OpenAI and one of the leading computing providers. As the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI develops, Friar called Microsoft “an incredible partner” and complimented CEO Satya Nadella for being “there early.”
“What I’m really pleased with is that we’ve raised money from all over the ecosystem,” Friar told Cramer, pointing out that there will be participation from venture capital firms, private equity players, investment funds and independents. “It didn’t matter where you went, people really believed in this AI revolution and wanted to put their money behind it,” he added.
Friar’s update on Tuesday comes about a month after OpenAI announced a $110 billion raise at an initial pre-money valuation of $730 billion. In that wave, Amazon invested 50 billion dollars Nvidia and SoftBank each committed $30 billion. In addition to its investment, Amazon announced a multi-year partnership With OpenAI. Companies will create custom models that will support Amazon’s customer-facing applications. OpenAI also said it would increase its current $38 billion deal with Amazon’s cloud computing division by $100 billion over the next eight years.
“We’re very excited about this deal,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC following the funding news last month. “AI will happen everywhere. It’s transforming the entire economy, and the world needs a lot of collective computing power to meet demand.”
Founded in 2015, OpenAI has seen unprecedented growth since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. According to CNBC’s report, the viral chatbot reached 900 million weekly active users and the startup generated approximately $13.1 billion in revenue last year.
Disclosure: Cramer’s Charitable Trust owns shares of NVDA, AMZN and MSFT.
