OpenAI company profile: valuation, funding & revenue

This OpenAI company profile covers the company's valuation, revenue, funding rounds, investors and history. OpenAI works in artificial intelligence, with a focus on frontier AI models and ChatGPT. It was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States. Its latest valuation on record is US$852 billion (post-money) (March 2026). Every figure links to a public source, and anything the company hasn't disclosed is marked as such.

Revenue

About US$2 billion a month; US$13.1 billion booked in 2025 — Company statements at the close of its 2026 round, as of March 2026. Source: Yahoo Finance.

Funding history

OpenAI timeline

Key dates from the sources on this page, oldest first. Metric snapshots are listed after the funding events.

• 2015 — OpenAI is founded in San Francisco by Sam Altman (CEO), Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman, Elon Musk and others.
• Mar 2026 — Primary round: US$122B committed, valuing the company at US$852B. Investors: Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank, Microsoft and others.
• March 2026 — Anchor investors: Amazon (US$50B, partly contingent), Nvidia (US$30B), SoftBank (US$30B), with Microsoft participating.
• March 2026 — Retail participation: Almost US$3 billion from individual investors through bank channels.

Investors

Overview

OpenAI makes ChatGPT, the AI assistant that turned large language models into a mainstream consumer product when it launched in November 2022. It also develops the GPT family of models, image and video generators, coding agents and a developer platform that thousands of companies build on. By valuation it is the most valuable private company in the world, and by usage ChatGPT is one of the most visited services on the internet.

OpenAI was founded in San Francisco in 2015 as a non-profit research lab. Its founding group included Sam Altman, now CEO, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman and Elon Musk, who later left the board and became a vocal critic and litigant. The organisation's stated mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

From non-profit to public benefit corporation

OpenAI's structure has changed several times. In 2019 it created a "capped-profit" company under the non-profit so it could raise the billions needed for computing power. That arrangement brought in Microsoft as its largest early backer. In October 2025 OpenAI completed a recapitalisation: the operating business became OpenAI Group PBC, a public benefit corporation, while the non-profit, renamed the OpenAI Foundation, kept control and a large equity stake. Microsoft received a significant minority stake under a revised partnership. The new structure made it far easier to raise conventional equity and paved the way for a possible IPO.

How OpenAI makes money

• ChatGPT subscriptions: Plus, Pro, Team, Business and Enterprise plans, from individuals paying monthly to companies buying thousands of seats.
• API: developers and businesses pay per use to build OpenAI's models into their own products.
• Agents and new products: coding tools, research agents and shopping and advertising features add newer revenue lines.

Its biggest cost by far is computing: training new models and serving hundreds of millions of users requires enormous data centre capacity, which OpenAI secures through deals with Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, AMD, Amazon and others worth hundreds of billions of dollars over several years.

Revenue

When it closed its 2026 round, OpenAI said it was generating roughly US$2 billion in revenue a month and had booked US$13.1 billion in 2025. That growth is extraordinary for a company whose first commercial product launched in 2020. OpenAI remains heavily loss-making because its spending on computing and research grows even faster. Various outlets have published higher annualised figures for later in 2026; those are run-rate estimates, so we show the company's own statement.

The record 2026 funding round

On 31 March 2026 OpenAI closed a round of US$122 billion in committed capital at an US$852 billion post-money valuation, the largest private financing in history. It had initially announced US$110 billion. Amazon agreed to invest US$50 billion, part of which Bloomberg reported was contingent on an IPO or a technology milestone; Nvidia and SoftBank each committed US$30 billion; Microsoft continued to participate. For the first time, almost US$3 billion came from individual investors through banks' wealth channels, and OpenAI said it would be included in several ARK Invest funds.

Later in 2026, reports described talks about more capital at a valuation well above US$1 trillion. Those talks hadn't closed when we last checked, so we use the March figure.

The IPO question

Reports during 2026 said OpenAI had begun preparing for an IPO, potentially at a valuation above US$1 trillion, with timing reported as late 2026 or 2027. An IPO would be the largest ever and would require OpenAI to publish audited financial statements for the first time. Our guide to investing in pre-IPO companies explains how people get exposure before a listing.

Competition

OpenAI competes with Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, Mistral AI and Chinese labs such as DeepSeek and Moonshot AI. Competition is on model quality, price, speed, safety and distribution. Open-weight models from Meta and Chinese labs put pressure on prices, while Google can bundle Gemini into products used by billions. OpenAI's advantages are ChatGPT's brand and user base, a large developer ecosystem and its access to capital.

Risks worth weighing

• Cost of compute: long-term infrastructure commitments are far larger than current revenue, so growth must continue for years.
• Governance: the 2023 board crisis, when Altman was briefly removed, showed how unusual structures can create instability.
• Litigation: copyright suits from publishers and authors, and Elon Musk's lawsuit over the conversion from non-profit control.
• Talent: rival labs and well-funded startups have recruited several senior researchers away.

OpenAI in numbers

Founded in San Francisco in 2015, OpenAI makes ChatGPT and the GPT models. It closed a US$122 billion round at an US$852 billion post-money valuation in March 2026, anchored by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, and said it was earning about US$2 billion a month after booking US$13.1 billion in 2025. The operating company is OpenAI Group PBC, controlled by the non-profit OpenAI Foundation.

Why the valuation is so high

An US$852 billion valuation on a company earning around US$24 billion a year implies a multiple of roughly 35 times annualised revenue. Investors are paying for expected growth: the belief that AI assistants and agents will become a basic layer of work and consumer software, and that OpenAI will capture a large share of that market. The bet also reflects the scale of the opportunity in replacing or augmenting human labour across industries. If growth slows or prices fall sharply, that multiple would be hard to sustain, which is why investors watch revenue growth and gross margin closely. Our guide to the largest private companies in the world puts OpenAI's valuation in context.

Signals to follow

Track ChatGPT's paid subscribers and enterprise seats, API revenue, gross margin as inference costs change, the size of new compute commitments, any S-1 filing, and the outcome of the Musk and copyright lawsuits.

Who should pay attention

Businesses adopting AI should compare OpenAI's enterprise plans with alternatives on data controls, pricing and model choice. Founders building on the API should plan for model changes and avoid depending on one provider. Investors should treat the valuation as a bet on years of rapid growth and watch for the first audited financials.

Latest developments (October 2026)

OpenAI was reported in 2026 to have confidentially filed for an IPO, though The New York Times later reported it was leaning toward listing in 2027 rather than 2026, according to AI Weekly. Reports said leadership would not accept a valuation below US$1 trillion in a listing, compared with its last private valuation of US$852 billion. Revenue reportedly reached about US$5.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, with heavy spending on computing.

Sources

Every figure on this page comes from the public sources below. Where sources disagreed, we used the company's own announcement or a primary news report. Private-company data changes; check the date beside each figure.

1. Yahoo Finance
2. SiliconANGLE