Didn't OpenAI's last raise in March value them at $300B [1]?
[1] https://www.channelinsider.com/news-and-trends/us/open-ai-fu...
Crunchbase appears to list it as $157B [2], but I seem to find the other terms & valuations more commonly.
[2] https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/biggest-rounds-october-2...
So OpenAI is running at a $13B ARR, meaning this is a ~23X valuation. I don't have a good read on margin.
But this would imply massive growth assumptions which I struggle a bit to understand where they come from.
(1) New customers new to AI or migrations from Claude/Perplexity/Google: The overwhelming majority of people already know about the offerings, leaving most new people to come from residual people who identify Plus/Pro as a worthy service (can't imagine this will be huge). OpenAI can be better than their peers for certain use cases but not sure it will drive massive growth
(2) API: If anything, my bet here is that price squeezing will continue to happen until most API services are dirt cheap / commoditized
(3) New consulting services: What's the differentiation here? Palantir and many consulting companies have been doing this for years and have the industry connections, etc
Not sure what I'm missing here, I like to not subscribe to the bubble thought but having a hard time merging the reality of running a business to the AGI-implied valuations
OpenAI hits $12 billion in annualized revenue, The Information reports https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-hits-12-billion-annu...
From online discourse and talking to people in different sectors that are impacted by "AI", I feel like there is great uncertainty, incredible hype and doomerism at the same time.
My intuition is that we're in a huge tech bubble that will correct at some point. I don't know when that is or how severe it will be. But why should this tech hype cycle be qualitatively different from any of the others?
So many comments talking about revenue, investors, profit, etc.
Remember when this company was a non-profit?! Our legal system is awful for letting this slide. The previous board was right.
IMO they are overvalued considering the competition from Google and Anthropic. They're not doing much interesting, unless they release GPT-5 and its a gamechanger.
I'm curious about how something like this affects compensation? OpenAI's compensation model is generally to use profit share instead of equity share. PPUs (Profit Participation Units) rather than RSUs (Restricted Stock Units).
Pretty insane valuation. It may pay off, it may not. Google search was vastly superior to its competitors. I don't think ChatGPT has that kind of edge.
This is a monopoly kind of valuation where no monopoly exists. Its like paying Microsoft billions for Internet explorer.
Personally I believe the future of AI models is open-source. The application of these models will be the real revenue driver.
It's so funny. Every single time a company raises a ton of money at a large valuation, the comments are always filled with "how do they justify this valuation" or "they aren't work X...because Y and Z do the same thing".
VC math is pretty simple - at the end of the day, there's a pretty large likelihood that at least 1 AI company is going to reach a trillion dollar valuation. VCs want to find that company.
OpenAI, while definitely not the only player, is the most "mainstream". Your average teacher or mechanic uses "chatgpt" and "AI" interchangeably. There's a ton of value in becoming a vowel, even if other technically superior competitors exist.
Furthermore, the math changes at this level. No investor here is investing at a $300B valuation expecting a 10x. They're probably expecting a 3x or even a 2x. If they put in 300MM, they still end up with 600-900MM.
This isn't math on revenue, it's a bet. And if you think in terms of risk-adjusted bets, hoping the most mainstream AI company today might at least double your money in the next ten years in a red-hot AI market is not as wild as it seems.
They haven’t released a new model in ages and their research seems dead in the water. People are going to get burned on all these meme stocks.
IMHO, investors are happy to pay 23x ARR because Nvidia trades at 29x EV/sales and arguably OpenAI should support a higher multiple given it is a smaller entity with more headroom for growth.
Sweet VC money fueling the AI hype. Funny enough, my TikTok feed recently started showing videos about how corporate America is going to replace workers with AI. I even came across an interview with Marc Benioff where he said Salesforce will deploy AI to help with engineering.
Aren’t they a non profit. Do I get stock for my donation?
How much do investors make on average on VC? I mean, OpenAI is hardly a startup. But VC money can't be a one way street forever. So either:
- VC invests on the whole sensibly and makes a return that justifies 10-15 year lock-in
- VC has somehow changed and is now unsustainable, it is a one way cash flow and it will blow up like MBS did
- VC sustainably delivers mediocre returns and gets some money in, some money out, but nothing special
Im not sure which it might be.
What does OpenAI have over XAI to make such a difference in valuation?
XAi includes x/twitter and lots of hardware and is valued at $113 billion
https://www.eweek.com/news/elon-musk-xai-valuation-debt-pack...
I thought they were going for $340B?[0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/30/openai-in-talks-to-raise-up-...
Nice they can poach 3 engineers back from Meta!
So how much more runway does this give OpenAPI? A year?
Ads in answers coming with OpenAI becoming the gateway to all online shopping.
Why is this article from nytimes - they aren't a great source for VC deal info.
It should be on track to becoming a $1trn company
Routine reminder that if newspapers should quote the valuation implied by the debt, not the equity, in mixed deals.
Doesn’t this all go to shit if they can’t flip into a for profit by December? Tons of cash commitments are tied to that far-from-finalised outcome.
300 billion is completely absurd
It boggles the mind what OpenAI could possibly do with all this money.
damnit why didn't they make it a trillion!? that would really send a message.
Personally, my estimate of a rational valuation would be:
$1-2T with no legal risk.
$300B assuming a rational and uncorrupt government, which should, at some point, kick them back to non-profit status, and convict people for fraud
Of course, too-big-to-fail means this won't happen.
I'd give my left nut to buy into OpenAI at this valuation. 300B is peanuts compared to where it would trade publicly, FCF and net income be damned. The growth and the optionality are there when you bring a tool this valuable to the world. This is destined to trade over 2T rapidly imo. PLTR (granted imo a bubble) trades above that, and PLTR is basically a glorified IBM/Accenture business model with mediocre growth.
Given their current product offerings, I really don't see a way they could ever justify a $300B valuation unless they get everyone on the planet to subscribe to their $200/month plan.
I'm calling it now: investors are gonna get burned hard on this one. Cause right now all they have is "well we are working on superintelligence" and to that I say "great, then what?". Even if they do make that breakthrough I don't see how that will equate to that kind of valuation, especially considering that Anthropic and Google are both hot on their heels.