OpenAI launches $400M second venture fund after backing Harvey, Cursor and more
Tech Funding News Abhinaya Prabhu ● Covered by 2 sources
OpenAI is raising a $400M venture fund, way bigger than its first. That could make it harder to tell where investing ends and steering begins.
Based on reporting by Tech Funding News, Abhinaya Prabhu — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI is lining up a second venture fund, and it is not thinking small. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company is preparing a $400 million vehicle, more than double the size of its first $175 million fund, and is looking for an experienced venture capitalist to run it.
The first fund has already shown how much reach even a modest check can buy. Launched in 2021 with outside money, including from Microsoft, the Startup Fund was controlled legally by Sam Altman rather than OpenAI itself. Since then, OpenAI has also used a series of special-purpose vehicles, including a $44.3 million SPV that Tech Funding News covered in 2024, which was the biggest one at the time.
That money has been spread across a lot of the application layer: 1X Technologies, Anysphere, Descript, Figure AI, Speak, Physical Intelligence, Harvey and Thrive AI Health. Two of those names are the clearest proof that an early investment can snowball. Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, got an $8 million seed round from the fund in 2023. Harvey has raced from a $5 billion valuation in 2025 to $8 billion by December and then $11 billion in March 2026, after a $200 million round co-led by GIC and Sequoia.
OpenAI’s latest move is more than portfolio housekeeping. It is a way to put money into startups that may later become customers, partners or, eventually, acquisition targets. That is not a secret playbook; it is just the older Google Ventures and Amazon model, updated for a market where model capabilities are converging and the fight has shifted to workflow, data and the customer relationship.
The new wrinkle is conflict. OpenAI has also backed Isara, a nine-month-old startup run by two 23-year-olds, one a former OpenAI safety researcher, even though it had no shipped product. It still landed a $650 million valuation on a $94 million round, with Stanley Druckenmiller and Michael Ovitz in the mix. If OpenAI controls a much larger fund now, the awkward question gets louder: can it invest cleanly without nudging startups toward its own stack?
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what vertical integration looks like when it wears a VC hat. OpenAI is no longer just selling the picks and shovels; it is quietly buying a say in who gets to build the mine. Anyone pretending that doesn’t create pressure on founders is selling fairy tales with a cap table attached.
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