OpenAI
Foundation Models
- Valuation
- $852B(Mar 2026 — largest private round ever)
- Total Funding
- $130B+
- Revenue
- $24B ARR(~$2B/month run rate, 2026)
- Profit Status
- Not yet profitable(heavy compute spend; ads pilot $100M+ ARR)
- Revenue Growth
- >200% YoY
- Employees
- Not publicly disclosed;~4,500 reported Mar 2026
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company building toward AGI for the benefit of humanity. Now a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). Developer of the GPT and o-series models, ChatGPT (1B+ WAU), GPT Image 2, and the Codex coding agent. Its 2026 consolidation retired several side products — Sora, the Atlas browser, and Operator — folding browsing and coding into ChatGPT Work. The $852B valuation funding round (Mar 2026) is the largest private fundraise in history.
Company History
Founded 2015 as nonprofit. Capped-profit structure 2019. ChatGPT launched Nov 2022 (100M users in 60 days). GPT-4 Mar 2023. Sam Altman briefly fired Nov 2023. GPT-4o May 2024. o1 Sep 2024. $6.6B at $157B Oct 2024. $40B SoftBank at $300B Mar 2025. GPT-5 launched (2025). Microsoft partnership restructured Apr 2026 (exclusivity removed, AWS allowed). $122B raised at $852B valuation Mar 2026 — largest private round ever. GPT-5.5 default model Apr 2026. ChatGPT crossed 1B WAU May 2026. Now a Public Benefit Corporation.
AI Models & Benchmarks
13 modelsGPT-6 Sol
Default model behind GPT-6 in ChatGPT paid plans; also in API as gpt-6-sol.
GPT-5.5
Former ChatGPT default (Apr 2026).
GPT-5
Major leap in coding, math, science, and visual reasoning. Available to all tiers including Free.
GPT Image 2
Successor to GPT Image 1.5. Default image model in ChatGPT. Three quality tiers, three resolution options. DALL-E 2/3 removed from API May 2026.
o3
Specialized reasoning model for software engineering, math, scientific reasoning. Being retired from ChatGPT Aug 26, 2026.
Benchmarks
- MMLU
- 96.7%
- HumanEval
- 99.5%
- GPQA Diamond
- 87.7%
- AIME 2024
- 96.7%
o4-mini
Higher usage limits than o3. Strong for high-volume reasoning tasks. Vision capabilities.
Codex
Autonomous coding agent. 3M weekly users by Apr 2026 — fastest-growing OpenAI product.
GPT-4o
Omni model - text, image, and audio natively. Legacy tier now.
Benchmarks
- MMLU
- 88.7%
- HumanEval
- 90.2%
- MATH
- 76.6%
- GPQA Diamond
- 53.6%
GPT-4o mini
Small, fast, affordable model - replaces GPT-3.5 Turbo.
Benchmarks
- MMLU
- 82.0%
- HumanEval
- 87.2%
DALL-E 3
State-of-the-art text-to-image model with prompt adherence.
Sora
Text-to-video up to 60 seconds, 1080p, photorealistic. Discontinued in 2026: app and web shut down 26 April, API sunsets 24 September.
Whisper v3
Open-source speech recognition model. Near human-level in 99 languages.
text-embedding-3-large
3072-dimension embedding model, best retrieval performance.
Company Timeline
15 milestones- Dec 2015Founded as nonprofit by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever
- Nov 2022ChatGPT launches - reaches 100M users in 60 days; fastest consumer app ever
- Mar 2023GPT-4 released with multimodal capabilities
- Nov 2023Sam Altman briefly fired by board, rehired within 5 days
- May 2024GPT-4o - native audio/vision/text omni model
- Sep 2024o1 reasoning model released
- Oct 2024$6.6B raised at $157B valuation
- Mar 2025SoftBank invests $40B at $300B valuation
- Apr 2025o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1 (1M context); ChatGPT 500M WAU
- 2025GPT-5 launched; GPT Image 1 replaces DALL-E 3; Codex coding agent; Operator agents
- Feb 2026ChatGPT free tier gets ads; new 'Go' ($8/mo) tier launched
- Mar 2026$122B raise at $852B valuation — largest private round ever; now a Public Benefit Corporation
- Apr 2026GPT-5.5 becomes default; GPT Image 2 launched; Microsoft exclusivity ended
- May 2026ChatGPT crosses 1 BILLION weekly active users — fastest consumer product to reach this milestone
- Oct 2026GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna released; GPT-6 becomes ChatGPT default
Funding Rounds
5 rounds| Date | Round | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 2019 | Strategic | $1B | Microsoft |
| Jan 2023 | Strategic | $10B | Microsoft |
| Oct 2024 | Series | $6.6B | Thrive Capital, NVIDIA, SoftBank, Microsoft |
| Mar 2025 | SoftBank | $40B | SoftBank |
| Mar 2026 | Mega Round | $122B | Amazon, NVIDIA, SoftBank, retail investors |
Products & Services
10- ChatGPT
- ChatGPT Work
- GPT-5
- GPT-5.5
- o3
- o4-mini
- GPT Image 2
- Codex (coding agent)
- Whisper
- OpenAI API
People & ecosystem
Key People
- Sam Altman (CEO)
- Greg Brockman (President)
- Mark Chen (Chief Research Officer)
- Brad Lightcap (COO)
- Kevin Weil (VP, AI for Science)
Key Investors
- Microsoft (~27% stake)
- SoftBank
- Amazon
- NVIDIA
- Thrive Capital
- Tiger Global