OpenAI's New $300 Million Funding Round

Who is in on the secretive startup?

Hey Everyone,

OpenAI is a secretive company, it’s very much a closed-AI startup. So who exactly is in on this ChatGPT craze and the secret backers of this project? We know the $10 Billion deal with Microsoft closed in January, 2023. Now just five months later it appears they did another $300 million in funding at a $29 Billion valuation.

This is actually just a “shares sale”, but still.

• Tiger Global

• Sequoia Capital

• Andreessen Horowitz

• Thrive

• K2 Global

• Founders Fund

Microsoft has likely given OpenAI about $13 Billion (maybe more) up until this point. It’s pretty likely Peter Thiel was in on seed funding.

We actually know from public records that Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder. Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder. Jessica Livingston, a founding partner of Y Combinator likely were all early seed funders.

Corporate Investors

• Microsoft

• Khosla Ventures

• Infosys

The three lead investors of OpenAI in its early days were considered:

Still according to insiders, outside investors stil now only own just over 30% of OpenAI. At a $27 to $29 Billion valuation.

We will likely have the official details in the coming week. We also know its costs OpenAI a lot of money to keep ChatGPT up and running each day. In the area of $700,000 according to reports. That’s a pretty impressive cash burn.

According to SimiliarWeb, ChatGPT got over 1 Billion internet visits in February, 2023. To be clear, it’s gotten a lot of hype. ChatGPT crossed 1 million users in 5 days of launch and set the record for the fastest-growing platform by gaining 100 million users by January. It reached 1 billion visits in February and 1.6 billion visits in March 2023.

As of mid April, 2025 ChatGPT was getting around 25 million visits a day globally it seems. But its knowledge base only goes up to 2021. GPT-5 is not being trained currently as of mid 2023. Although a privacy block from Italy has been resolved with more privacy considerations.

The hype suggests that ChatGPT is the most viral product on the internet in some time. Maybe ever.

Substack has witnessed a few hundred new Newsletters around A.I. and this Generative A.I. bump since November, 2022. OpenAI’s monthly page views jumped from 18.3 million in November 2022 to 304 million in December 2022, a 1561% increase after the launch of ChatGPT.

Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation [Link]

Whatever the case enterprise adoption has been very high. There are countless companies now that have baked ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 into their products in some form or another.

• Microsoft’s $10 billion infusion gave OpenAI a lot of run room. Microsoft’s infusion would be part of a complicated deal in which the company would get 75% of OpenAI’s profits until it recoups its investment. That could take quite a few years I would assume. But many people want on the bandwagon.

• Reid Hoffman are among those with the most to gain, and of course the founders.

• The Information reported in October, 2022 that Microsoft, which had invested $1 billion in cash and cloud credits into OpenAI in 2019, was in talks to increase its stake. They sure did, and BingAI and Microsoft’s stock performance has been through the roof ever since. In the past 6 months alone, Microsoft’s stock is up 32%, a massive amount for a company with such a large market cap.

From PitchBook data, it looks like Sequoia, A16Z and Tiger Global had been earlier investors in the company. It’s no wonder then Bill Gates keeps praising A.I. It’s a major Venture Capital coup.

The $10 billion investment by Microsoft is a bet that OpenAI will remain far ahead of other companies. That’s hard to imagine considering the quality of Google DeepMind and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence. Though it might stay ahead of startups like Anthropic for some time, unless Alphabet decides to back them in similar fashion, which is somewhat likely.

If Advertising was integrated into ChatGPT, it would have already far surpassed Bing. and If ChatGPT continues to take off, it could steal marketshare from time spent in Google itself.

Microsoft, like many other tech giants, was laser-focused on the future of AI and now Google, Amazon, Meta and Apple have to be too. Even at a time of rapid layoffs in technology, already 300,000 in just the first six months of 2023, sky high salaries are going down as software engineers fear for their future with Coding A.Is. How fast things have changed since November, 2022.

ChatGPT launched on November 30th, 2022 and the world has never been the same since.