With the completion of its latest funding round, Silicon Valley darling and AI pioneer OpenAI has nearly doubled its valuation from earlier this year (and almost quintupled it from 2023) to land at $157 billion.

As CNBC reports, the names of those involved in the $6.6 billion funding round were not released in this week's press release, but Thrive Capital led the round with participation from Microsoft, Nvidia, and SoftBank.

“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,” OpenAI wrote in the press release.

Beyond leading the investment round, Reuters details that Thrive Capital received a special deal "to invest another $1 billion next year at the same valuation if the AI firm hits a revenue goal."

While that revenue target was not revealed, Reuters notes that OpenAI's "flagship product, ChatGPT, is expected to bring in $2.7 billion in revenue this year, jumping from $700 million in 2023. The chatbot service, which charges a $20 fee every month, has about 10 million paying users."

In addition to the new funding, OpenAI has "long been in talks to restructure itself as a for-profit company. But that is not expected to happen until sometime next year, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s plans. Under the terms of the new investment round, OpenAI has two years to transform into a for-profit business or its funding will convert into debt," writes the New York Times.

Non-Compete Investment?

In a rare move, OpenAI asked its investors to not invest in rival companies like Anthropic or Elon Musk's xAI, reports the Financial Times.

Additionally, "two AI applications firms, including AI search startup Perplexity and enterprise search firm Glean, were also named in OpenAI's conversation with investors, suggesting OpenAI plans to sell more of its tools to enterprises and end users to grow revenue streams."

Verdict

It show come as no surprise that the darling of Silicon Valley and the leader of the current AI boom has seen its valuation skyrocket over the last two years. However, as the company continues to grow, the pressure is mounting to prove that its revenue model is sustainable.