Analysis
Pulse has previously covered OpenAI's $11 billion raise. The new development: OpenAI is now expected to brief investors on that round as soon as next week, The Information reported on November 6, as the company continues raising capital at a pace few startups in history have matched.
Pulse has also reported how OpenAI trimmed its own fundraising target earlier this fall, and the company's IPO valuation target has separately been reported down to $1.25 trillion from $1.4 trillion -- the same stretch in which rival Anthropic's own IPO target fell from roughly $2 trillion to $1.2 trillion-$1.3 trillion, according to Pulse's November 6 coverage.
OpenAI's funding history
The new $11 billion raise follows a $122 billion round that OpenAI closed at the end of March 2026, lifting its post-money valuation to $852 billion. Backers in that round, in order of disclosed size, included:
“- Individual investors -- $3B combined, with Andreessen Horowitz also named among the round's backers.”
- Amazon -- $50B commitment, funded in tranches ($15B upfront, $35B contingent on OpenAI meeting certain conditions).
- Nvidia -- $30B commitment.
- SoftBank -- $30B commitment.
- Individual investors -- $3B combined, with Andreessen Horowitz also named among the round's backers.
That structure -- a handful of strategic mega-checks alongside a smaller pool of financial investors -- has become OpenAI's template for raising money fast enough to keep pace with its compute spending.
What does OpenAI do?
OpenAI, founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, has built its business around ChatGPT, the coding agent Codex, and an enterprise platform called OpenAI Frontier. Enterprise clients now make up roughly 40% of the company's revenue, and OpenAI uses a tiered model that combines free consumer access with paid subscription tiers and API usage fees.
Who else is raising at this scale
OpenAI isn't alone in raising tens of billions of dollars this year: Anthropic announced a $65 billion round in May 2026 that valued the company at $965 billion, with Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group and Sequoia Capital among the participants. Both companies are now trying to translate those private valuations into public ones, with Anthropic's roadshow reportedly set to begin around the same time OpenAI briefs its own investors next week. The two companies' fundraising has become a kind of shadow IPO process in itself: each new private round resets the baseline that bankers and institutional buyers will use once either company actually prices shares on a public exchange, which is why investors are parsing both the size of OpenAI's new raise and the softer valuation language in its IPO target.
What to watch next
Neither OpenAI's original fundraising target for this round nor its exact new valuation has been independently confirmed beyond The Information's reporting, so the precise terms remain to be seen until OpenAI's investor briefing next week. What's already clear is the scale: two private AI labs raising capital in the tens of billions of dollars within the same year, even as both separately push toward IPOs that would value them in the trillions, is a pace this industry has never sustained before.