At the juncture where investors are hunting for formidable AI startups to be backed, OpenAI’s latest funding announcement has greased the wheels as the paradigm of a promising avenue. With an incontrovertible gravity against the competition, AI can enkindle a seismic shift in the world, and the 2015-est OpenAI’s recent valuation is evidence of its victory in this space currently.
ChatGPT purveyed to become OpenAI’s masterstroke and has been gaining steam over the last five months – with backers closing OpenAI’s new funding round at $300 million. OpenAI’s valuation in 2023 is nearly $27-$29 billion.
The tender offer is divergent from that of Microsoft’s $13 billion stake in OpenAI, which became a hot scoop for investors trying to wrap their heads around OpenAI’s $29 billion valuation. Many industry analysts also speculated that Elon Musk’s threat to sue Microsoft for discontinuing Twitter was based on his ex-AI investment, OpenAI.
OpenAI Funding Sources
Microsoft’s $13 billion investment is cardinal to the tech giant’s objective of integrating OpenAI’s technology across its business and the VCs are crossing the threshold as financial backers. Discussions began in January amid viral torrents of interest in OpenAI and its ChatGPT business.
OpenAI’s funding round includes VC firms like Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive, Sequoia Capital, K2 Global, and plausibly Founders Fund.
Peter Thiel carved the notch as a backer yet this will be the first time that the Founders Fund will invest, with K2 Global and Thrive also scoring as first–time backers. The other investors had been early investors in OpenAI.
According to TechCrunch, OpenAI’s funding round’s term sheets have rolled out with investors’ signatories and the funds have been transferred but OpenAI’s investment news was scheduled to be made public next week. The investors possess nearly 30 percent of OpenAI now.
“Venture is an inscrutable place – one can go big to broke to big again, any time. They are probably trying to use OpenAI’s latest funding round, seeking a golden apple.”
Last year, the tech sector’s plight was a pantomime owing to the financial crisis, coercing numerous venture capitalists to slow down the pace of investing. Waiting with bated breath for bankable opportunities, VCs found a strong contender in OpenAI.
OpenAI Valuation 2023: ChatGPT Funding
OpenAI’s most certifiable hit with more than 1 billion ring-ins is undoubtedly ChatGPT. The likely interest of investors proposing to tap into the artificial intelligence-powered technology acquiesces that OpenAI’s valuation is set to propel. The ecosystem around AI tech is developing at warp speed – hundreds of businesses and people have indoctrinated GPT-3 and ChatGPT into their products or services. Other big tech companies that have hearkened to the generative AI industry are Google’s Bard and Meta’s LLaMA.
OpenAI’s funding announcement has catapulted the generative AI market into a thriving pedestal. Not sans controversies, OpenAI’s focus on ChatGPT has been questioned for its integrity and privacy concerns.
“We’ve been building OpenAI for seven years and gradually we’re growing more confident that it will work. We’ve been on the grind sweating every detail for a long time. Most people aren’t willing to do that.”
Apart from ChatGPT, OpenAI also made tidings with its AI-based image generator named DALL-E, updated last July; a speech recognition model Whisper AI; and GPT-4, its harmonious amalgamation in March with Microsoft’s Azure and Bing to supercharge the tech giant’s attempts of putting the kibosh on Google’s search engine services.
