Analysis
OpenAI has secured about $11 billion toward its latest funding round, less than half of the $30 billion it originally set out to raise, according to the Wall Street Journal and The Decoder. Investor demand has cooled enough that the company is now turning to a different pool of capital to close the gap.
OpenAI has also lowered its valuation target to $1.25 trillion from an earlier $1.4 trillion goal, and plans to raise up to $20 billion more from family offices and high-net-worth individuals, The Decoder reported.
What OpenAI does
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, was founded in December 2015 and is based in San Francisco, according to deal-tracking site Longterm Wiki. The company has raised money almost every year since, each round larger than the last, as it races to fund the computing infrastructure its large language models require. Its last disclosed round, a Series G that closed in March 2026, brought in $122 billion and pushed its post-money valuation to $852 billion, led by SoftBank Group.
“OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, was founded in December 2015 and is based in San Francisco, according to deal-tracking site Longterm Wiki.”
OpenAI's funding history: how much has it raised?
Longterm Wiki's funding tracker lays out the climb:
- 2023 Microsoft-led round — $29B valuation
- October 2024 Series E — led by Thrive Capital, $157B valuation
- March 2025 Series F — led by SoftBank Group, $300B valuation
- March 2026 Series G — $122B raised, $852B post-money valuation, led by SoftBank Group
Measured against that trajectory, a $1.25 trillion target for the current round is roughly a 47% step up from the last mark -- a smaller jump than the roughly 2.84x increase the company managed between the March 2025 and March 2026 rounds.
Who invested in OpenAI this time
The Decoder's report did not name specific backers for the current round beyond the pivot toward family offices and wealthy individuals rather than the institutional names that led earlier rounds. Those earlier backers are a different cast: Microsoft put in $1 billion in July 2019 and $10 billion in January 2023, Thrive Capital led the 2024 Series E, and SoftBank Group led both the 2025 Series F and the 2026 Series G, per Longterm Wiki's records. A shift toward family-office capital, rather than sovereign funds or strategic tech investors, would mark a real change in who holds influence over OpenAI's next phase.
That shift is also a caveat on the headline number. An $11 billion haul is still among the largest private fundraisings on record, and a $1.25 trillion valuation target is larger than the market capitalization of all but a handful of public companies. But raising barely a third of the original $30 billion goal, and turning to a less institutional investor base to close the gap, suggests the easy money for AI mega-rounds is drying up -- even for the sector's best-known name. Whether OpenAI closes the remaining gap on these terms or trims the round further remains to be seen.
The AI funding market and OpenAI's competitors
The fundraising retreat lands as rival Anthropic's valuation has pulled ahead. Anthropic raised $65 billion in a Series H that valued the company at $965 billion, "eclipsing rival OpenAI's value for the first time," according to Bloomberg Law; that round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital. A $1.25 trillion close would put OpenAI well back in front of Anthropic's mark, which is part of why the shortfall matters beyond OpenAI's own balance sheet: the two companies' valuations have become a running scoreboard for how investors price the entire generative-AI race.
What to watch next for OpenAI's IPO
The Decoder also reported that OpenAI is planning an IPO as early as next year, with Anthropic potentially beating it to market as soon as November. A private round priced at $1.25 trillion, instead of $1.4 trillion, sets a lower bar for public investors to clear whenever that listing happens -- and a round leaning on family-office capital, rather than new institutional anchors, gives OpenAI less of a built-in base of long-term holders heading into that process. Pulse has tracked OpenAI's valuation climb through each of its last four rounds; this is the first one where the company hasn't hit its own number.