Is OpenAI getting anxious? The new funding round is opening to individual investors for the first time

Ask AI · Why did OpenAI open financing to individual investors during intense competition?

On April 1st, Beijing time, OpenAI announced the completion of a new round of financing, with a total amount of $122 billion, led by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank. SoftBank and venture capital firm a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) served as co-leads for this round. The financing amount set a new record for a single-round funding for startups worldwide and pushed OpenAI’s post-investment valuation to $852 billion.

Notably, in this round of financing, OpenAI for the first time opened participation to investors through banking channels, raising over $3 billion from individual investors. At the same time, OpenAI will be included in multiple exchange-traded funds managed by ARK Investment Management, further expanding its shareholder base. The company also increased its existing revolving credit line to approximately $4.7 billion, providing greater flexibility for continued large-scale investments, supported by a global syndicate including JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and others.

Alongside the financing, OpenAI disclosed that the weekly active users (WAU) of ChatGPT have risen to 900 million, soon reaching 1 billion, with over 50 million paying subscribers. The enterprise market already has 9 million paid enterprise seats. The company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) approaches $25 billion, with peak monthly revenue surpassing $2 billion. Its revenue growth rate is nearly four times that of Alphabet and Meta.

Despite significant improvements in financial data, the company remains in a loss-making burn phase. Previously, there were reports that OpenAI would initiate an IPO in Q4 of this year. The company has also recently adopted aggressive loss-cutting strategies, including shutting down high-cost video generation models like Sora.

While OpenAI is raising funds, its biggest competitor, Anthropic, is also accelerating capital moves, and the competition between the two has entered a heated stage.

Anthropic completed a $30 billion G-round financing on February 12, 2026, with a post-money valuation of $380 billion. At the same time, its annualized revenue reached $14 billion, and its 2026 revenue forecast was raised to around $18 billion. Anthropic is also advancing its IPO plans, with a target of possibly listing as early as October 2026. Market predictions suggest that Anthropic’s IPO will happen faster than OpenAI’s.

After this round of financing, OpenAI’s valuation exceeds Anthropic’s $380 billion, far surpassing the market caps of Zhipu ($55.9 billion) and MiniMax ($46.3 billion). OpenAI’s high valuation mainly stems from its positioning as an “infrastructure-level” company. The funds from this round will primarily be used to build an intelligent infrastructure layer, attempting to transform AI from a simple dialogue system into a “super-agent” capable of autonomous actions.

OpenAI claims to have gradually become a core infrastructure for artificial intelligence, enabling users worldwide to easily build various applications. Especially, stable and continuous computing resources are a strategic advantage throughout the system. OpenAI emphasizes that Nvidia remains the cornerstone of the company’s infrastructure, with its training clusters and most inference stacks still running on Nvidia GPUs. Through this cooperation, both sides will further deepen this partnership to support scale expansion.

(This article is from First Financial)