OpenAI closed a $122B funding round on March 31, 2026 at an $852B valuation — up from $300B just thirteen months earlier. That's the short answer. The longer answer is more interesting.
A company doesn't typically triple in value in just over a year without either revenue tripling to match or the market deciding the old math no longer applies. With OpenAI, both are partly true — and a serious rival just claimed to have already caught up on the one number (revenue) that's supposed to justify the other (valuation).
OpenAI Valuation 300 Billion to 852 Billion: What Changed in 13 Months
OpenAI's valuation went from $300B in March 2025 to $852B in March 2026, a 2.8x increase in just over a year, driven by a $40B SoftBank-led round, a $500B October 2025 employee share sale, and a $122B primary round anchored by Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank. Revenue roughly doubled over the same window, from about $13B to $25B annualized, meaning the valuation grew faster than the revenue backing it.
The Full OpenAI Valuation Timeline: 2024 to 2026
The climb didn't start in 2025. OpenAI has repriced roughly every six to eight months since early 2024, and each step has gotten larger in absolute dollar terms even as the percentage jumps have compressed. Track how this compares to the rest of the private AI market on our AI Valuations dashboard.
| Date | Valuation | Event |
|---|---|---|
| January 2024 | $86B | Tender offer valuation |
| October 2024 | $157B | $6.6B round led by Thrive Capital |
| March 2025 | $300B | $40B round led by SoftBank |
| October 2025 | $500B | $6.6B employee secondary sale |
| March 31, 2026 | $852B | $122B primary round, Amazon/Nvidia/SoftBank |
| April 24, 2026 | $880B | Forge Global secondary-market indication |
Figures blended from Bloomberg, CNBC, Crunchbase News, and Forge Global secondary-market data, 2024-2026. Secondary-market indications reflect private trading activity, not primary funding-round terms.
OpenAI Valuation Growth, 2024-2026 ($B)
OpenAI's valuation grew nearly 10x in just over two years, with the steepest single jump — $352B — coming in the five months between the October 2025 secondary sale and the March 2026 primary round.
Bloomberg, CNBC, Crunchbase News — valuation marks at each disclosed funding or secondary event, 2024-2026.
How OpenAI's $852B Valuation Is Actually Priced
The $122B round was co-led by SoftBank alongside a16z, D. E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price, with strategic checks from Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B) plus continued participation from Microsoft. Additional participants included BlackRock affiliates, Blackstone, Coatue, Fidelity, Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, and — for the first time — over $3B from retail investors through bank channels.
At $852B against roughly $25B in annualized revenue, OpenAI is trading at about 34x current-year revenue. That's a rich multiple by any public-market standard, but it's priced against where revenue is going, not where it is: OpenAI's ARR has roughly tripled since 2024's $3.7B full-year figure, and the company says it's targeting $125B a year in compute spend by 2030 to sustain that growth curve.
OpenAI Valuation vs Anthropic Revenue: Who's Actually Ahead in 2026
This is where the OpenAI story gets complicated. Anthropic said it hit a $30B annualized revenue run rate in April 2026, up from $9B at the end of 2025 — 80x growth in under two years — and now counts more than 1,000 enterprise customers each spending over $1M a year. That puts Anthropic's claimed revenue above OpenAI's roughly $25B ARR, even though Anthropic's own valuation sits around $350B, less than half of OpenAI's $852B. OpenAI disputes the comparison, arguing Anthropic's accounting overstates revenue by about $8B.
OpenAI vs Anthropic: Valuation and Revenue, Mid-2026
Company disclosures, VentureBeat, Bloomberg, PitchBook — figures as of April-June 2026.
Is OpenAI's $852B Valuation Justified?
The bull case is straightforward: revenue tripled since 2024, enterprise now makes up roughly 40% of it and is on track to reach parity with consumer by year-end, and the March 2026 round let retail investors in for the first time — a step companies rarely take unless an IPO is genuinely on the horizon. Compare that trajectory against other late-stage private companies and OpenAI's growth rate is still unmatched at this scale.
The bear case is that OpenAI posted a negative 122% non-GAAP operating margin in Q1 2026, meaning it's still spending well over $2 for every $1 of revenue, and it's projecting $125B a year in training and compute costs by 2030 — over 4x what Anthropic says it will spend for comparable output. If ChatGPT consumer growth continues to stall, as some analysts flagged in Q1 2026, while Anthropic's enterprise-heavy revenue keeps compounding faster, the gap between OpenAI's $852B price tag and its $350B rival could look a lot harder to defend a year from now.
The Bottom Line
OpenAI's valuation nearly tripled from $300B to $852B in thirteen months, but the number that actually matters — revenue — only roughly doubled over that stretch, and Anthropic now claims to have passed OpenAI outright at $30B versus $25B ARR. The $122B round proves institutional and now retail investors still believe in the growth curve, with Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank each writing nine-figure checks. But a 34x revenue multiple on a company burning cash at a negative 122% operating margin only holds up if OpenAI's growth rate stays ahead of Anthropic's — and as of April 2026, on the one metric both companies actually control, it no longer is.
