OpenAI, the company behind the artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT, is discussing raising capital worth nearly $30 billion, according to two people familiar with the matter, as numerous investors rush to capitalize on the new sensation among search engines.
The San Francisco-based company is in talks with investment groups, including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, to conduct a secondary stock offering, in which investors would buy shares of OpenAI from current shareholders, including employees.
The deal would mark an increase in the company’s valuation from around $20 billion in 2021, when it was valued during a secondary stock sale. Such growth would make the company an exception in Silicon Valley as tech firms brace for significant reductions in their valuations, and investors have pulled back from new deals, the Financial Times reported.
The discussions were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, the Founders Fund declined to comment, and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from FT. The talks come less than a month after OpenAI released the latest version of its GPT-3.5 software. The chatbot, which can converse with users via text and images, quickly went viral and surpassed one million users in five days.
A person familiar with the matter warned that discussions regarding the OpenAI offering are ongoing and that the value of the potential deal has not been finalized, FT reported.
