OpenAI Pledges $1.5 Billion to PE Enterprise AI Project

That’s according to a report Wednesday (April 22) from the Financial Times (FT), which characterizes the move as part of the startup’s plan to overtake chief competitor Anthropic in the race to sell artificial intelligence (AI) tools to businesses.

Sources with knowledge of the matter told the FT that OpenAI will contribute an initial $500 million in its equity into the joint venture, with the option to add another $1 billion later.  

The venture will be valued at $10 billion as part of a funding round expected to close early next month, the sources said. OpenAI’s PE plans had been reported by Reuters in March. Additional reporting said the company has reassigned its chief operating officer to oversee the project.

Investors such as TPG, Bain Capital, Advent International, Brookfield and Goanna Capital will invest an additional $4 billion, sources told the FT. The private equity backers will invest for five years, and OpenAI has promised them an annual 17.5% return. 

“That is a floor . . . but we expect it to be much higher,” said a person with knowledge of the plans.

The new venture “generates revenue by being the best in the world at AI deployment, at rewiring businesses. If we’re very early in this cycle [of AI adoption], then that’s a very valuable asset,” that source said.

The FT had reported earlier this month that Anthropic was gaining on OpenAI as more businesses adopt its tools. 

The report cited figures from payments company Ramp showing Anthropic increasing its share of enterprise customers, while OpenAI’s business adoption levels were flat. OpenAI has disputed the FT’s findings.

The news follows a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report saying OpenAI was working with consulting firms to sell companies on its coding product.

“Helping companies bridge that gap between how to use it, how to expand it and how to move even more quickly is part of our responsibility, and these partnerships are going to allow us to help scale that to the world,” OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser told the WSJ.

As covered here previously, Anthriopic is also in discussions about its own joint venture that would see it sell its AI tools to the private equity firms’ clients.

“Anthropic has been repositioning Claude from a conversational assistant into a tool embedded in enterprise operations,” PYMNTS wrote last month, in reference to the startup’s flagship AI product. As covered here, the company is expanding Claude beyond chat “into structured enterprise workflows, integrating the model into coding, document analysis and business process automation.”