ChatGPT’s OpenAI raises $300 million at $27 – $29 billion valuation

OpenAI, the company behind the conversational AI model ChatGPT, has raised $300 million from venture capital firms at between $27 million and $29 billion valuation. According to a report from Techcrunch, , the firms include Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, K2 Global and Founders Fund.

This investment is different from Microsoft’s investment, said to be around $10 billion, announced earlier this year.

Founded in December 2015 by a group of technology industry leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba, OpenAI is an AI research organization created with the goal of advancing artificial intelligence in a way that is safe and beneficial for humanity.

To date, OpenAI has raised a total of $11.3 billion in funding over 7 rounds. Its first funding raise was in December 2015, when the organization received $1 billion in committed funding from a group of investors that included Tesla CEO Elon Musk, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and several venture capital firms. At the time, this was the largest single investment ever made in an artificial intelligence company.

The company recently started rolling out ChatGPT 4, the latest in the iterations of the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022.

OpenAI has not officially confirmed the investment story but it is expected to make this investment public next week. However with this investment, external investors now own more than 30% of the company.