ChatGPT maker OpenAI raises $6.6 billion in fresh funding as it moves away from its nonprofit roots

OpenAI said Wednesday it had raised $6.6 billion in venture capital investments as part of a broader shift by the ChatGPT maker away from its nonprofit roots.

Led by venture capital firm Thrive Capital, the funding round was backed by tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia and SoftBank, according to a source familiar with the funding who was not authorized to speak about it publicly.

The investment represents one of the biggest fundraising rounds in U.S. history, and ranks as the largest in the past 17 years that doesn’t include money coming from a single deep-pocketed company, according to PitchBook, which tracks venture capital investments.

Microsoft pumped up OpenAI last year with a $10 billion investment in exchange for a large stake in the company’s future growth, mirroring a strategy that tobacco giant Altria Group deployed in 2018 when it invested $12.8 billion into the now-beleaguered vaping startup Juul.

OpenAI said the new funding “will allow us to double down on our leadership in frontier AI research, increase compute capacity, and continue building tools that help people solve hard problems.” The company said the funding gives it a market value of $157 billion and will “accelerate progress on our mission.”