OpenAI

AI research lab building safe artificial general intelligence.

HQ: San Francisco, CA, USA

Company research

Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals

Updated Aug 2, 2026

Overview

OpenAI is a private AI research and deployment company founded to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. It develops frontier models and deploys them through consumer, developer, and enterprise products.

Primary product

ChatGPT; other principal products include the OpenAI API/platform and Codex.

Founded

2015

Headquarters

San Francisco, California, United States

Team size

Approximately 4,500–7,000+ reported in 2026; public estimates conflict, so no single count is treated as authoritative.

Work style

Hybrid

Industry

Artificial intelligence / research services

Sub-industry

Generative AI, foundation models, AI agents, and AI infrastructure

Offices

San Francisco, California

Mountain View, California

New York City, New York

Seattle, Washington

London, United Kingdom

Dublin, Ireland

Paris, France

Tokyo, Japan

Singapore

Sydney, Australia

Business model

Paid ChatGPT subscriptions

Enterprise software subscriptions and deployments

Usage-based API access

Strategic partnerships and licensing

Professional services / forward-deployed enterprise implementation

Potential advertising and hardware businesses

Funding

Stage

Late-stage private / pre-IPO; OpenAI Group PBC is controlled by the OpenAI Foundation

Total raised

$196B

Latest round

Private funding round · Mar 2026

Latest amount

$122B

Private funding round

Mar 2026 · SoftBank Group, Andreessen Horowitz, and D. E. Shaw Ventures

$122B

Additional tranche of 2025 financing

Aug 2025 · Dragoneer Investment Group

$8.3B

Series E / SoftBank-led financing

Mar 2025 · SoftBank Group and Dragoneer Investment Group

$40B

Debt financing

Oct 2024 · Bank syndicate

$4B

Series D

Oct 2024 · Thrive Capital

$6.6B

Series C

Apr 2023

$300M

Series C / Microsoft investment

Jan 2023 · Microsoft

$10B

Series B

Jul 2019 · Microsoft

$1B

Series A

Mar 2019 · Khosla Ventures

$50M

Seed / early financing

Jan 2016 · Y Combinator

Initial nonprofit funding / guaranteed commitments

Dec 2015 · Founding donors and supporters

$1B

People & investors

Leadership

Sam Altman

Chief Executive Officer

Greg Brockman

Co-founder; President / applications leadership

Sarah Friar

Chief Financial Officer

Mark Chen

Chief Research Officer

Brad Lightcap

Chief Operating Officer / special projects leadership

Jason Kwon

Chief Strategy Officer

Chris Lehane

Chief Global Affairs Officer

Dane Stuckey

Chief Information Security Officer

Vijaye Raji

Chief Technology Officer, Applications

Peter Welinder

Vice President, Products and Partnerships

Lilian Weng

OpenAI research and safety leadership

Founders

Andrej Karpathy

Early senior researcher/technical leader (formerly at OpenAI/Tesla)

Durk Kingma

Co‑founder / early researcher

Elon Musk

Co-founder; former board member

Ilya Sutskever

Co-founder and former Chief Scientist

John Schulman

Co-founder

Pamela Vagata

Co‑founder / early team member

Trevor Blackwell

Founding team member

Vicki Cheung

Co‑founder (early team member)

Investors

Work & culture

The careers materials emphasize humanity first, humility, ownership, curiosity, intense focus, creativity over control, fast updates, and shipping useful products. Recruiting materials describe a high-intensity, builder-oriented environment that values autonomy, agency, end-to-end ownership, and comfort with ambiguity.

Work style

Hybrid

Compensation

OpenAI does not publish a complete company-wide compensation table. Public reporting and job-market data indicate unusually high compensation for frontier-AI researchers and engineers, typically combining salary with profit-participation or equity-like units; reported figures vary substantially by level and source.

Benefits

Health and mental-health care

Parental and birth-parent leave

Fertility and family-planning coverage

Company-sponsored retirement plan

Paid time off

Annual learning and development stipend

Conference budget

Employee resource groups

Daily breakfast, lunch, and dinner at offices

Coaching sessions for employees and dependents

Travel insurance

Residency and emerging-talent programs

Product & market

Pricing

Freemium ChatGPT with paid individual tiers; per-user/team/enterprise plans; usage-based API pricing; enterprise agent deployments generally sold through account teams rather than self-serve pricing.

Differentiators

—Frontier model research combined with mass-market deployment
—Very large ChatGPT user and developer distribution
—Integrated consumer, enterprise, API, coding, voice, and agent products
—Large-scale compute and strategic infrastructure partnerships
—Safety research, evaluations, guardrails, and Foundation oversight
—Ability to use deployment feedback to improve models and products

Technology

GPT foundation models

Large language models

Multimodal models

Reinforcement learning and post-training

Machine learning inference and training infrastructure

OpenAI API

ChatGPT

Codex

AI agents

Voice and real-time AI

Cloud computing and large-scale data centers

Safety evaluations, guardrails, and model monitoring

Customers

Consumers and ChatGPT subscribers

Developers using the OpenAI API

Enterprise customers

Microsoft

Choco

CyberAgent

Gradient Labs

Customer-support and sales organizations using AI agents

Research institutions and academic users

Competitors

Anthropic

Google / Google DeepMind

Meta AI

Microsoft Copilot

xAI

Mistral AI

Cohere

Chinese open-weight model providers

GitHub Copilot

Cursor

Scale & contact

Estimated revenue

Approximately $20B–$25B annualized revenue/run-rate in 2026 based on external estimates and reported ~$2B monthly revenue; not audited public revenue.

Estimated monthly visits

508M

1-888-GPT-0090 (OpenAI Presence English-language support channel; not necessarily a general corporate switchboard)

Signals & risks

Other

Jun 2026

OpenAI reportedly confidentially filed a draft S-1, increasing public-market, governance, disclosure, and execution pressure; timing was not committed.

Source

Other

Jul 2026

Multiple senior safety and executive departures and reorganizations were reported in 2026, including changes to the independent standing and reporting structure of safety functions. Coverage is partly based on internal-source reporting and should be monitored.

Source

Acquisition

Jun 2026

OpenAI agreed to acquire Ona, formerly Gitpod, to add secure cloud execution and orchestration to Codex. Price was undisclosed and the transaction was subject to closing conditions/regulatory approval.

Source

Acquisition

May 2025

OpenAI acquired io Products, the hardware company associated with Jony Ive, in a reported $6.5 billion transaction.

Source

Other

Jul 2026

Competition from Anthropic, Google, and lower-cost open-weight models, together with very high compute commitments and losses, was identified by CNBC as a material business pressure.

Source

Latest news

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar tells employees ARR in July topped all of Q2

CNBC · Jul 2026

CNBC reported that Sarah Friar and Bret Taylor told employees July annualized recurring revenue exceeded the whole second quarter, while highlighting competition from Anthropic and lower-cost open models and pressure associated with the company’s valuation.

Introducing OpenAI Presence

OpenAI · Jul 2026

OpenAI introduced Presence, an enterprise agent-deployment product for voice and chat workflows with policies, guardrails, approved actions, evaluation, and human escalation; it launched through a limited general-availability program rather than self-serve.

OpenAI adds two bank CEOs to its board as IPO signals grow stronger

Startup Fortune · Jul 2026

Reporting described the addition of Nubank CEO David Vélez and BNY CEO Robin Vince to OpenAI boards, with Vince chairing the audit committee, in the context of OpenAI’s confidential S-1 and public-market preparation.

OpenAI power consolidates under co-founder Greg Brockman ahead of IPO

CNBC · Jul 2026

CNBC reported leadership consolidation around Greg Brockman after executive changes, including the departure or reassignment of senior leaders, as OpenAI prepared for a possible IPO.

OpenAI raises $122 billion to accelerate the next phase of AI

OpenAI · Mar 2026

OpenAI announced a $122B funding round at an $852B post-money valuation, anchored by Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank with continued Microsoft participation; it reported approximately $2B in monthly revenue and enterprise revenue above 40%.

Jobs and careers at OpenAI

816 jobs at OpenAI

Head of Finance - Data Centers

Remote

Strategic Finance

San Francisco; San Francisco, California, United States

Today

Remote

Full-time