By Davit Kirakosyan
According to Berber Jin and Miles Kruppa from The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI, the research lab behind the viral ChatGPT chatbot, is considering selling shares in a deal that would value the company at approximately $29 billion.
According to people familiar with the matter, venture-capital firms Thrive Capital and Founders Fund are in talks to invest in the deal, which is structured as a tender offer, with the investors buying shares from existing shareholders such as employees. The deal would total at least $300 million in share sales.
The deal would roughly double the company’s valuation from a prior tender offer completed in 2021, when it was valued at about $14 billion, making it one of the most valuable U.S. startups on paper despite generating little revenue.
Last year, OpenAI released a number of AI-powered products that gained significant attention, such as the image-generating program Dall-E 2 and the chatbot ChatGPT.