OpenAI has filed a confidential initial public offering (IPO) application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The ChatGPT developer plans to go public in the fourth quarter of this year. At what valuation?
OpenAI has filed a confidential initial public offering (IPO) application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The ChatGPT developer plans to go public in the fourth quarter of this year. At what valuation?
The decision to go public intensifies the fierce competition between the tech giants, as the filing came just a week after Anthropic’s similar move and on the eve of SpaceX’s public market launch, CNBC reported, citing its own sources, as well as an official statement from OpenAI itself.
The confidential filing regime for the S-1 allows the AI developer to submit financial statements to regulators for detailed review before the figures become public to the general public and prospective investors. The company has enlisted the help of leading investment banks, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, to prepare the documents.
The company itself is still cautiously commenting on specific dates for the IPO.
«We recently filed a confidential S-1. We expect this information to leak, so we are simply announcing it ourselves. We have not yet decided on the timing. This may take some time, as there are things that are easier for us to implement while remaining a private company. But it is a difficult trade-off, and filing gives us the opportunity to go public sooner if that turns out to be the best option,» OpenAI noted.
In parallel, OpenAI plans to hold a tender offer that will allow employees to sell their shares. The buyout is planned to be carried out at the startup’s latest valuation, which reached $852 billion .
It is noted that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will have to convince investors of the financial viability of the company, which has already attracted over $180 billion in funding, but continues to spend enormous amounts of money on purchasing computing power and infrastructure for training new AI models.
This week, Altman announced the start of the «third phase» of OpenAI’s development, which follows the pure research and product transformation phases.
«We are now entering the third phase. The economy is starting to reshape itself around AI. The big question now is how to make advanced AI accessible, safe, useful, and simple enough for every person and organization to benefit from it,» Altman said.
In a show of financial discipline, OpenAI has recently been shutting down side projects like its video tool Sora and focusing resources on its enterprise division and its coding assistant Codex, a direct competitor to Anthropic’s Claude Code tool that is currently experiencing «a ChatGPT-like moment,» according to Altman.
Recall that OpenAI is planning the largest update to ChatGPT in its history, aiming to turn it into a «super app» with programming tools and AI agents to increase revenue ahead of a potential IPO.
