OpenAI eyes $1.2T valuation in fresh funding talks ahead of potential 2027 IPO
Tech Funding News Abhinaya Prabhu ● Covered by 27 sources
OpenAI is talking to investors about a round that could value it above $1.2 trillion. It’d come soon after its last huge raise, which says a lot about how hot the AI money chase is.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Abhinaya Prabhu — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI has been in early talks with investors about a new funding round that could push its value above $1.2 trillion, the Financial Times reported. Investors, not OpenAI, made the first move. The number is still fluid, but even the idea tells you how far the company has drifted from normal private-market behaviour.
If the deal lands, it would come only months after OpenAI closed $122 billion in committed capital in March at an $852 billion post-money valuation. That was already the biggest private financing round Silicon Valley has seen, with Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank anchoring it, and Microsoft plus a16z also in the mix. A jump to $1.2 trillion would be about 41% in less than six months.
There’s a reason OpenAI may want fresh money without going public. It has already confidentially filed IPO paperwork and then pushed the listing back. A private round buys time, keeps disclosure lighter and gives backers like SoftBank and Thrive Capital another chance to build positions before an eventual float. The company’s appetite for capital is plainly not small: it spent $34 billion last year, mostly on training and infrastructure, and posted a $38.5 billion net loss in 2025 on $13.07 billion in revenue.
OpenAI is also still using private-market tools to keep people onside. In August, it completed a $7 billion tender offer at the same $852 billion valuation, letting current and former staff cash out stock. Meanwhile, its business keeps growing. Annualised revenue passed $40 billion in July, Greg Brockman said the run rate rose more than 20% month-over-month, and he tied that to GPT-5.6, ChatGPT Work and Codex. OpenAI has since launched GPT-6 Astra, on September 3, and bought Promptfoo, a red-teaming platform used by more than a quarter of Fortune 500 companies, to feed into its Frontier enterprise agent platform.
The timing matters because Anthropic is now circling the same number from the other direction. It raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation in May, then confidentially filed for an IPO and reportedly picked Nasdaq for a listing that could come as soon as October. Anthropic shares have also been trading on secondary markets around a $1.2 trillion implied valuation. So the race is no longer just about model quality. It is about who gets to tell public markets what an AI giant is actually worth first.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is peak AI-era finance: a company making eye-watering losses, then heading back to investors for a bigger number before it has even faced the public market. OpenAI is clearly betting that private money will stay more patient than public money, which is a nice way of saying it wants the price without the paperwork. Fair enough, but the longer this goes on, the more the valuation feels like a dare rather than a business result.
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