Maker of ChatGPT OpenAI said on Monday that it had finalised a funding round led by SoftBank, a Japanese investment group.

The $40bn (€37bn) total raised is one of the largest sums ever secured by a private start-up.

The deal also values OpenAI at $300bn (€277.6bn), almost double the firm’s previous valuation of $157bn when it last raised in October. This makes it one of the world’s most valuable private firms, competing with the likes of SpaceX and TikTok parent firm ByteDance.

SoftBank plans to funnel $30bn into OpenAI, while the rest of the funding will come from investors including Microsoft, Coatue, Altimeter and Thrive.

SoftBank’s contribution could however drop to $20bn if OpenAI fails to adequately restructure its operations by the end of the year.

OpenAI said it would use the money to “push the frontiers of AI research even further” and “pave the way toward AGI that benefits all of humanity”.

Adapting to rival products

Earlier on Monday, the firm also announced that it would be releasing a cheaper, more accessible AI model in the coming months. 

“We’ve been thinking about this for a long time but other priorities took precedence. now it feels important to do,” CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X.

Responding to competition from China’s DeepSeek and Meta’s Llama, the new model would be a pivot away from ChatGPT’s paid subscription offers.

Offering an open-weight product means that developers can fine-tune the model for their own tasks by studying the disclosed parameters.

This offering is still a step away from open-source models, which offer more information, allowing developers to build from scratch. 

Critics of open models argue that they are too vulnerable to use by bad actors.

Even so, former investor Elon Musk is a notable defender of the open model. He has called on OpenAI to “return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was”.