OpenAI raises $122B in record funding round, IPO plans expected
OpenAI has raised $122 billion at a valuation of $852 billion in its largest funding round till date. SoftBank co-led the round alongside Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and T. Rowe Price Associates, with participation from Amazon, Nvidia, and Microsoft. Around $3 billion came from individual investors via bank channels.
This comes as the company is set to go public later this year.
Softbank recently announced it secured a $40 billion bridge loan for its investments in OpenAI and for general corporate purposes. This move highlighted SoftBank’s increasing efforts to strengthen ties with OpenAI amid the highly competitive AI race.
“AI is driving productivity gains, accelerating scientific discovery, and expanding what people and organizations can build,” OpenAI said in a release. “This funding gives us the resources to continue to lead at the scale this moment demands.”
READ: OpenAI joins AI ‘superapp’ race: What it means for ChatGPT users (March 20, 2026)
With this latest funding round, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman would have to justify the company’s massive valuation as it gets ready for an IPO. The ChatGPT-maker has been trying to rein in spending of late, by retreating from massive spending plans, and shutting down its short-form video app Sora.
OpenAI also said it expanded its revolving credit facility to about $4.7 billion, supported by several of the top global banks. The facility remains undrawn, the company said, which suggests it’s bolstering its financial flexibility as it ramps spending on compute and infrastructure, rather than responding to near-term liquidity needs.
In its press release, OpenAI included updates on revenue and user numbers, claiming it’s generating $2 billion in revenue per month and taking a shot at competitors: “At this stage, we are growing revenue four times faster than the companies who defined the Internet and mobile eras, including Alphabet and Meta.”
READ: OpenAI partners with Capgemini to scale enterprise AI (February 24, 2026)
OpenAI also said it has more than 900 million weekly active users in consumer AI and over 50 million subscribers, with search usage nearly tripling in the last year. The company also mentioned its ads pilot is bringing in more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue in under six weeks, opening up a serious potential revenue stream for the company that built its user base without ads.
OpenAI also claims momentum is mirrored on the business side, which now makes up 40% of its revenue (up from around 30% last year) and is “on track to reach parity with consumers by the end of 2026.” Its growth across agentic workflows, the company said, is driven by its newest model GPT-5.4. The company also called itself an “AI superapp,” indicating that it wants to be the primary interface for people using AI. According to TechCrunch, all this adds up to a message that OpenAI is building its public market narrative in real time, and this round is as much about anchoring IPO expectations as it is about the capital itself.
