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I.T. News – October 4, 2024

1 - The investors behind OpenAI’s historic $6.6 billion funding round

Business Insider. October 2, 2024.

Sam Altman has taken his share of bumps and bruises over the last year, but he proved yet again that he can convince investors to pour hundreds of millions into OpenAI.

The latest funding round appeared to be the hottest ticket in Silicon Valley, drawing a who’s who of investors looking to get in on the buzzy AI startup’s latest capital raise.

The $6.6 billion round gave OpenAI a $157 billion post-money valuation and minted it into one of the most valuable startups in the world. The startup’s valuation is now in the same neighborhood of publicly traded companies like Uber or AT&T.

In a statement posted to its website, OpenAI said the funding will “accelerate progress on our mission” and that it was “grateful to our investors for their trust in us.”

The investors’ participation — which reportedly carried the stipulation that they shouldn’t invest in rival AI companies — comes as OpenAI is discussing how to transform from a nonprofit organization into a more traditional for-profit company and several high-profile executives have left to join rivals or start their own venture.

Here’s who broke out their checkbooks.

Thrive Capital

Thrive Capital led the funding round, a spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider. The VC firm, founded by Josh Kushner, has made early investments in several now-prominent companies such as Slack and Instagram and previously invested in OpenAI.

The venture firm invested about $1.25 billion, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Thrive also has the option to invest another $1 billion in OpenAI next year at its current valuation if a revenue goal is reached, Reuters reported last month.

Besides being an investor in OpenAI, Kushner is close with Altman, The Information reported last month. “i have been fortunate to work with many great investors; there is no one i’d recommend more highly than josh,” Altman wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, in August.

SoftBank

The highly anticipated funding round also attracted newcomers like SoftBank. A source close to the Japanese media-technology conglomerate told Business Insider that it had invested $500 million.

The deal gives the Tokyo-headquartered firm, led by enigmatic founder Masayoshi Son, its first major stake in a company developing the large language models (LLMs) that have powered buzzy apps like ChatGPT in the generative AI boom.

While SoftBank led several investments into AI-linked Silicon Valley firms before the generative AI boom through its $100 billion Saudi-backed Vision Fund, it has been slow to invest in a post-ChatGPT world as it has sought to repair its reputation following its disastrous WeWork bet.

However, Son has signaled in recent months that he would be ready to make an investment splash again to capture the opportunities in the generative AI frenzy.

At the company’s annual meeting in June, the SoftBank founder told shareholders that past investments were just a “warm-up” for AI and advancing the technology is “what I was born to do.”

ARK Venture Fund

Cathie Wood’s ARK Venture Fund agreed to invest at least $250 million into this funding round, which is its second investment to the company, Business Insider first reported. Ark has also invested in several other big-name startups like Anthropic, xAI, SpaceX, FigureAI, and Databricks.

Wood compared the state of artificial intelligence with that of the internet in the early 1990s in an April interview with Morningstar.

“We had just begun, and we had miles to go,” Wood said. “In fact, we’re still learning how powerful the internet is. That is where we are with artificial intelligence today.”

ARK did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.

Microsoft

Microsoft invested a little under $1 billion into OpenAI’s latest funding round, according to The Wall Street Journal report. The tech giant has a partnership with OpenAI