OpenAI valuation under investor scrutiny

Some OpenAI investors are questioning the company’s reported $852 billion valuation as it shifts toward selling more tools to businesses. (finance.yahoo.com) Reuters reported on April 14 that the concerns surfaced after the Financial Times said OpenAI had redrawn its product roadmap twice in six months, first in response to Google and then to Anthropic. The same report said OpenAI raised $122 billion last month and may pursue an initial public offering as early as 2026. (finance.yahoo.com) One early backer told the Financial Times that OpenAI already has ChatGPT, described in the report as a 1 billion-user business growing 50% to 100% a year, and questioned why management was emphasizing enterprise and coding products. Reuters said Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar pushed back, and an OpenAI spokesperson said the $122 billion round was oversubscribed and showed “strong conviction” in the company’s direction. (finance.yahoo.com) The debate lands a year after OpenAI publicly announced a different financing round: $40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation on March 31, 2025. OpenAI said that money would fund research, computing infrastructure and products for the 500 million people using ChatGPT each week. (openai.com) SoftBank said on April 1, 2025 that the deal’s first closing used a $260 billion pre-money valuation, with up to $30 billion more tied to a restructuring of OpenAI’s for-profit arm by the end of 2025 or, in some cases, early 2026. That financing structure put OpenAI’s corporate setup and future listing plans at the center of investor discussions well before this week’s report. (group.softbank) OpenAI’s business has kept growing while those questions built. Reuters reported on June 9, 2025 that OpenAI’s annualized revenue run rate reached $10 billion in June, up from $5.5 billion in December 2024, and that the company was targeting $12.7 billion in 2025 revenue. (finance.yahoo.com) That same Reuters report said OpenAI had about 500 million weekly active users at the end of March 2025 and lost about $5 billion the year before. Those numbers help explain why investors can see both scale and strain in the same company. (finance.yahoo.com) Rivals have been getting bigger, too. Anthropic said on March 3, 2025 that it raised $3.5 billion at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation and pointed to customers including Zoom, Snowflake, Pfizer and Amazon’s Alexa+. (anthropic.com) OpenAI’s case to investors now rests on two tracks at once: keeping ChatGPT dominant with consumers while turning enterprise demand into steadier revenue. The new scrutiny suggests some backers are no longer treating those goals as automatically compatible at any price. (finance.yahoo.com)