OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, finalized a massive funding round of $122 billion (about 180 trillion won), valuing the company at $852 billion (about 1,280 trillion won). It is the largest single investment round on record.
OpenAI said on the 31st (local time) that it has finally confirmed the size of its recently closed investment round at $122 billion. It increased by $12 billion from the $110 billion it released at the end of last month.
Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank led this investment round, and the additional $12 billion was raised from a broader set of investors, including individuals.
In this investment, OpenAI for the first time allowed individual investors to participate through bank channels and raised $3 billion. It is also set to be included in the exchange-traded funds (ETF) of Ark Invest led by Cathie Wood, known in Korea as the "money tree sister." The move is seen as an effort to attract more investors ahead of an initial public offering (IPO) within the year.
OpenAI added that it expanded its bank loan limit to $4.7 billion to secure funding flexibility.
With this funding, OpenAI secured firepower to expand artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and acquire talent. Sarah Friar, OpenAI chief financial officer (CFO), said this funding is "at a level that overwhelms even the mega IPOs to date."
OpenAI emphasized that its monthly revenue is $2 billion (about 3 trillion won), and that its revenue growth rate is four times faster compared with when competitors such as Google and Meta were at a similar stage in the past.
ChatGPT's weekly active users (WAU) exceed 900 million, and paying subscribers also top 50 million, which it described as an "overwhelming lead" in the consumer AI market. It added that search usage nearly tripled in a year, and that the annual recurring revenue (ARR) of ads currently in pilot surpassed $100 million in just six weeks.
In the corporations institutional sector as well, it recorded rapid growth, with corporations customers accounting for more than 40% of total revenue. According to OpenAI, weekly users of Codex, a coding tool for corporations, increased fivefold in three months, surpassing 2 million weekly users.
OpenAI is currently building an AI super app that integrates ChatGPT, Codex, and a web browser into one. OpenAI emphasized, "This is not mere product simplification but a distribution strategy," adding, "By integrating them, we can directly translate advances in model performance into user adoption and engagement."
However, despite raising astronomical investment funds, OpenAI is reportedly still posting losses. In the process of focusing on its core AI models, OpenAI decided to suspend the operation of some features, including the video-generation app "Sora," to reduce expense and improve compute efficiency.
The industry interprets this as a strategic choice by OpenAI to focus on improving metrics such as revenue ahead of a listing in the second half of this year.