OpenAI has raised $8.3 billion at a $300 billion valuation, accelerating its plan to secure $40 billion in funding by year’s end. The latest round, led by Dragoneer Investment Group, comes after the company raised $2.5 billion in March.
According to The New York Times on Friday, Dragoneer committed $2.8 billion to the raise, representing roughly 10% of its total funds. The funding round brings OpenAI closer to its 2025 target, which includes a $30 billion commitment from SoftBank.
The funding round was five times oversubscribed, meaning investors wanted to invest roughly $40 billion, the Times said. OpenAI prioritized new strategic investors over existing backers, frustrating some investors who received smaller allocations than they hoped for.
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Other investors include Blackstone, TPG, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter Capital, Coatue Management, D1 Capital Partners, Thrive Capital and Tiger Global.
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A brief history of OpenAI
OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and others as a nonprofit research lab committed to ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits humanity.
In 2019, it created a capped-profit subsidiary, OpenAI LP, to raise outside funding, securing a $1 billion investment from Microsoft and transitioning toward a more commercially driven model.
OpenAI expects to generate $12.7 billion in total revenue in 2025, according to internal projections reported by Bloomberg in March.
More recently, DealBook reported that the company’s annual recurring revenue has reached $13 billion and is projected to surpass $20 billion by year-end. In September, OpenAI reported reaching 1 million paid users for its business-focused ChatGPT plans.
ChatGPT has also dominated its Large Language Model competitors. Data from FirstPageSage shows it has steadily maintained more than 70% of the LLM market share since January 2024.
Despite surging adoption, OpenAI doesn’t expect to be cash-flow positive until 2029, when revenue could top $125 billion.
Related: OpenAI ignored experts when it released overly agreeable ChatGPT
AI-focused crypto projects attract fresh venture capital
While OpenAI continues to attract record-breaking investment from traditional venture firms, the crypto industry is carving out its own AI frontier. A growing wave of decentralized AI startups is raising capital to build open-source, token-powered alternatives to proprietary models.
In April, AI startup Nous Research raised $50 million in a Series A round led by Paradigm, valuing the company at $1 billion. Nous is developing open-source AI models on the Solana blockchain to provide decentralized alternatives to platforms like OpenAI and DeepSeek.
In July, Poseidon raised $15 million in seed funding led by a16z Crypto. The US-based full-stack AI data layer aims to solve the shortage of high-quality, legally cleared training data for AI models by providing structured, real-world data sets that can be used without copyright concerns.
Overall, crypto venture funding has surged in Q2 of 2025 to over $10 billion, its best quarter since early 2022. In June alone, $5.14 billion was raised.
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