OpenAI raises $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation

Background

OpenAI runs ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers typed prompts with text. Serving a product like that to a very large audience means paying for computing power continuously, so the company's ability to raise capital is tied directly to its ability to keep the product running. Two kinds of numbers matter in that story: how many people use ChatGPT, and how much money investors are willing to put in.

The $40 billion round

In spring 2025 OpenAI raised $40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation^[1][3]. A post-money valuation is the value assigned to a company after newly raised money has been added, so the figure already includes the fresh cash; investors and employees track it because it effectively sets the price of the company's shares.

The round was led by SoftBank Group^[3]. In venture funding, the lead investor is the party that puts in the largest share of the money and usually negotiates the terms, with other investors following its assessment. The raise was public before it was completed: on 31 March 2025, SiliconANGLE reported that OpenAI was raising $40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation^[3], which put both numbers in view while the deal was still in progress.

The product numbers behind the valuation

Investors assessing a subscription business look at two figures that measure different things. At the end of March 2025, ChatGPT had about 500 million weekly users^[2] — people who opened the product at least once within a week. In April 2025 the service reached 20 million paid subscribers^[1] — people paying a recurring fee. The first number measures reach; the second measures revenue. The distance between half a billion weekly users and twenty million paying ones describes the central commercial question for OpenAI: how much of a very large audience converts into paying customers, and over what period.

A second valuation marker

In October 2025 an employee share sale of up to $10 billion valued OpenAI at $500 billion^[1]. This is a different kind of transaction from a funding round. In a round, the company issues new shares and the cash goes to the company itself; in an employee share sale, existing holders — employees who received stock as part of their compensation — sell some of it to outside buyers. Such sales are a common way for staff at private companies to turn paper holdings into money before any listing, and the price agreed in the sale gives an updated reading of what investors think the company is worth.

Why it matters

Put together, the two transactions frame where OpenAI stood during 2025: a $40 billion round led by SoftBank Group in the spring^[3], and a valuation of $500 billion reached through an employee share sale by October^[1]. Between them sat the product numbers — roughly 500 million weekly users and 20 million paid subscribers^[1][2] — which are the evidence investors were working from. Training and serving large models is capital-intensive, so funding on this scale is also a rough indicator of how much money the current build-out of AI systems absorbs: the sums go into computing and into the people who build and operate the systems, not into a single product launch.