Reuters, citing The New York Times, shared further rumors about the upcoming new round of financing for OpenAI by investors, among whom Thrive Capital will play a key role, investing $1 billion this year and next, but Apple chose to drop out of this race for another stage of negotiations.
Image source: OpenAI
As you know, OpenAI expects to raise about $6.5 billion from investors in the near future, and negotiations with the main ones should be completed next week. The Wall Street Journal found out that Apple refused to participate in this round of financing for the startup OpenAI. But Nvidia and Microsoft have not left the race, and the latter may fork out an additional $1 billion, although it has already invested about $13 billion in OpenAI’s capital. In general, the new round of financing should raise OpenAI’s capitalization to more than $100 billion.
If we return to the negotiations between OpenAI and Thrive Capital, the former promises the latter to triple its revenue for the year from the current $3.7 to $11.6 billion, calling on the said investment fund to spend more than $1 billion on its development this year and almost the same amount in next. True, Thrive Capital will be ready to invest a second billion dollars only if OpenAI’s revenue exceeds $11.6 billion next year. By the way, this year OpenAI expects to receive losses in the amount of $5 billion, since the costs of developing computing infrastructure are very high.
OpenAI is going to decide by the end of next week on the parameters of the next round of financing, which involves attracting funds from investors in the form of convertible bonds and estimates the startup’s capitalization at $150 billion. At the same time, investors insist on restructuring OpenAI and turning the startup into a commercial company without the dominance of the non-profit component. Now OpenAI investors are limited in the size of the profit share transferred to them, and this clearly does not suit them.
It is noteworthy that only Thrive Capital has agreed with OpenAI on the possibility of purchasing bonds next year at the current price. If OpenAI’s capitalization skyrockets, it will allow Thrive Capital to increase its stake next year without increasing its cash outlay. From subscriptions of commercial ChatGPT users alone, the OpenAI startup could earn $2.7 billion this year, almost four times more than a year earlier. The chatbot now has about 10 million commercial users, who shell out $20 a month for access to the service.