The Financial Times was able to uncover interesting details about OpenAI’s $6.6 billion deal for a new round of funding this week, which valued the company’s capitalization at $157 billion. During the negotiations, OpenAI insisted that investors abandon their intentions to invest in the capital of competing companies. startups in the field of artificial intelligence.
Image source: OpenAI
Such a requirement is quite rare, as noted by venture investors, which allows many of them to diversify risks by investing in different companies in the same sector. Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, for example, support both OpenAI and xAI simultaneously. The specificity of this round of OpenAI financing, however, was that there were a large number of people willing to participate, and therefore the startup could set conditions that are atypical for such deals, not wanting to contribute to the development of competitors’ business.
One of the participants in the negotiations recalled that Uber at one time dictated similar conditions because it considered itself the dominant company in its segment. The largest participant in this round of financing was the venture fund Thrive Capital, which invested $750 million of its own funds and raised about $550 million from smaller investors through a project company. The fund also agreed to invest another $1 billion by the end of next year, but based on OpenAI’s current valuation of $150 billion before the latest funding round. The Khosla Ventures fund invested $500 million, according to the source.
Less than a year ago, OpenAI’s capitalization did not exceed $87 billion, and in April last year it was five times lower than its current level. Such dynamics show that investors believe in the startup’s potential in the artificial intelligence systems market, since they consider it one of the pioneers in the field of creating chatbots that work with generative technologies.
It is reported that the head of the company, Sam Altman, took part in discussions about allocating him a stake in the event of OpenAI restructuring and turning the startup into a commercial organization, although he had previously denied such negotiations. The new round of funding has made OpenAI the biggest startup in Silicon Valley, but ByteDance and SpaceX outperform it overall.