With the latest stock sale agreement reached between OpenAI and venture capital firm Thrive Capital, OpenAI's valuation has risen to over $80 billion.
This means that the company's valuation has grown rapidly, reaching nearly three times that of nine months ago, and has leapt to become the third highest valued startup in the world.
OpenAI Leaps to the Third Largest Unicorn in the World
As early as the end of last year, there were reports that OpenAI was negotiating a new stock sale deal, which reportedly valued OpenAI at $90 billion.
According to the latest report, insiders have confirmed that OpenAI will sell its existing stocks in accordance with the acquisition offer led by Thrive, and have indicated that the transaction will allow employees to redeem their shares in this artificial intelligence company. According to this transaction, the company's valuation reached nearly $80 billion.
As a comparison, when OpenAI completed a $300 million stock sale nine months ago, the company's valuation was still around $27 billion.
According to CB Insights, an intelligence website, the $80 billion valuation means that the company has become the third highest technology startup in the world in terms of market capitalization, after ByteDance ($225 billion) and SpaceX ($150 billion), a space transportation company led by Elon Musk.
The biggest beneficiaries in the AI wave
OpenAI was founded in 2015, and the company received widespread attention. It began at the end of 2022 when the company released the artificial intelligence chat tool ChatGPT, which ignited a wave of artificial intelligence throughout last year.
Last year, OpenAI was incredibly popular, not only gaining huge attention but also receiving significant investments from multiple technology companies and investors.
As of now, Microsoft has invested a total of $13 billion in OpenAI, although the tech giant has stated that it does not own any shares in OpenAI and is "entitled to share in profit distribution.". Last April, several venture capital firms including Thrive, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and K2 Global also agreed to acquire new shares of OpenAI, valuing it at around $27 billion.
OpenAI CEO Sam Ultraman was briefly expelled from the company last year, but he quickly reinstated after causing a huge uproar within the company. He stated that the company has no intention of going public in the near future.
At present, OpenAI is still rapidly advancing on the path of artificial intelligence development. On Thursday Eastern Time, OpenAI released its latest product Sora, which can generate videos based on text prompts. However, the video service has not yet been made available to the public, and it is unclear when it will be available, as OpenAI has stated that it is still taking "several important security measures" to address potential issues related to misinformation and bias.