OpenAI, not yet public, raises $3B from retail investors in monster $122B fund raise

OpenAI has closed a deal to raise $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation, its largest funding round to date as the company is expected to hit the public markets this year.

The round will add to OpenAI’s war chest as it spends enormous amounts of money on AI chips, data center buildouts, and hiring top talent.

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.

About $3 billion came from individual investors via bank channels. OpenAI is also going to be included in several ETFs managed by ARK Invest, giving more people access to the private company’s stock to broaden its shareholder base in advance of its reportedly upcoming IPO .

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.

The company’s press release on the raise reads less like a typical blog post than a draft of an S-1; it’s heavy on the flywheel metaphors, digs into revenue per compute unit, and offers the kind of TAM-justifying language that institutional investors drool over.

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.”

The company 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. OpenAI said 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.

The AI giant 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 consumer by the end of 2026.” Its growth across agentic workflows, the company said, is driven by its newest model GPT-5.4.

Finally, OpenAI also called itself an “AI superapp,” making it clear that it wants to own the primary interface for how people use AI.

All of it adds up to a single message: 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.

Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy, and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence. Her work has also appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and other publications.

You can contact or verify outreach from Rebecca by emailing rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at rebeccabellan.491 on Signal.

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