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.
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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