The artificial intelligence (AI) startup has held early discussions with investors about a private funding round ahead of its planned initial public offering (IPO), according to a Financial Times (FT) report Tuesday (Sept. 15) citing sources familiar with the matter.
The ChatGPT maker raised $122 billion at $852 billion in March, and filed confidentially for its IPO in June, though when that listing will happen remains unclear. The decision to proceed with this new funding round would depend on when OpenAI chooses to go public, said one of the sources, who added that the talks were initiated by investors, not the company.
PYMNTS has contacted OpenAI for comment but has not received a reply. The company declined to comment when reached by the FT.
The FT notes that OpenAI hopes to leverage an uptick in demand for its products in the wake of its latest model roll-outs: GPT-5.6 in July and Astra earlier this month.
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Those models have fueled the company’s revenue growth following a relatively slow start to the year, which saw rival Anthropic overtake OpenAI in terms of valuation, the report added.
OpenAI “needs capital,” one of the sources told the FT, referring to the billions of dollars the company has burned through on AI model training. The company spent $34 billion last year and maintains it has sufficient resources after its March funding round, the report added.
The company’s annualized revenue topped $40 billion last month after a 20% uptick in the wake of GPT-5.6’s release, the report said, citing another source familiar with the matter.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Saturday (Sept. 12) that the IPO is unlikely to happen before 2027. He has said it would be an “ill-advised moment” for the company to go public amid increasing concerns about the existential risks presented by AI.
Those concerns have led Altman and the heads of other AI companies to call for a slowdown in development of the technology.
In a column published Wednesday (Sept. 16), PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster argued that the warnings about the dangers of AI don’t line up with these companies’ behavior.
“The gap between what these companies say and what they do is the most useful data point in this whole debate,” she wrote. “Either the headlines are overstated, or the plan is nowhere near the size of the problem. Neither is a reason to hand the leaders a slower race, and neither is a reason to write the rules in a panic.”
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