OpenAI is raising an additional $10 billion from investors as part of its historic funding round, CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday.
The fresh capital brings OpenAI’s record fundraise to “north of $120 billion,” Friar said in an interview on “Mad Money.” That well exceeds the ChatGPT creator’s initial target of $100 billion. OpenAI announced the first tranche of investment in late February, and it’s been seen as possibly its last private fundraise before a potential blockbuster initial public offering.
Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG and T. Rowe Price are participants in the new $10 billion commitment, according to Friar. Notably, Microsoft, a longtime investor in OpenAI and one of its major computing providers, is also joining this part of the funding round. While the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI has evolved, Friar called Microsoft “an incredible partner” and complimented its CEO, Satya Nadella, for being “there early.”
“What I’m really pleased about is we raised money all around the ecosystem,” Friar told Cramer, pointing to involve from venture capital firms, private equity players, mutual funds and sovereign entities. “It didn’t matter where you went, people really believed in this AI revolution and they wanted to put their money to work behind it,” she added.
Friar’s update Tuesday come roughly a month after OpenAI initially announced a $110 billion raise at a $730 billion pre-money valuation. In that wave, Amazon invested $50 billion, while Nvidia and SoftBank each committed $30 billion. In addition to its investment, Amazon announced a multi-year partnership with OpenAI. The companies will build custom models that will support Amazon’s customer-facing applications. OpenAI also said that it will expand its existing $38 billion agreement with Amazon’s cloud computing division by $100 billion over the next eight years.
“We’re super excited about this deal,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC after the funding news last month. “AI is going to happen everywhere. It’s transforming the whole economy, and the world needs a lot of collective computing power to meet the demand.”
OpenAI, which was founded in 2015, has seen unprecedented growth since launching ChatGPT in late 2022. The viral chatbot has amassed 900 million weekly active users, and the startup raked in roughly $13.1 billion in revenue last year, CNBC has reported.
Disclosure: Cramer’s Charitable Trust owns shares of NVDA, AMZN and MSFT.
