OpenAI Potentially Soars to $500 Billion Valuation — New Peak for Global AI Unicorns

TradingKey - ChatGPT developer OpenAI is in early-stage talks to raise capital through a private sale of employee shares at a staggering $500 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter. This would mark a 67% increase from its previous $300 billion valuation just four months ago, potentially making OpenAI the most valuable unicorn in the world in 2025.

Rapid Valuation Surge

The new valuation comes amid growing investor demand for stakes in the leading artificial intelligence company. While the financing round is still in its early stages, firms including Thrive Capital have reportedly engaged in discussions. Neither OpenAI nor Thrive has commented.

In early April 2025, OpenAI raised $40 billion in a round led by SoftBank, valuing the company at $300 billion — the largest single funding round on record, according to PitchBook. Prior to that, in October 2024, OpenAI was valued at $157 billion.

This means OpenAI has:

• Increased its valuation by two-thirds in just four months
• More than doubled its value in under a year

From Co-Leader to Global #1

According to the Hurun Research Institute’s “Global Unicorn Index 2025” released in late June, there were 1,523 unicorns worldwide — private companies founded after 2000 with valuations exceeding $1 billion.

At the time:

• SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, ranked first with a $350 billion valuation
• OpenAI and ByteDance (TikTok’s parent) tied for second at $300 billion

If the new $500 billion valuation is confirmed, OpenAI will surpass SpaceX to become the world’s most valuable privately held company, and the undisputed leader in the AI unicorn space.

Strong Fundamentals Despite Talent Challenges

Despite recent reports of talent poaching — including key researchers moving to Meta — OpenAI continues to demonstrate strong user growth and commercial momentum.

On Monday, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT now has 700 million weekly active users, up sharply from 500 million in late March.

Its paying business customers have grown to 5 million, up 67% from 3 million in June, signaling accelerating monetization and enterprise adoption.

On Tuesday, OpenAI made a rare strategic move by launching two open-weight inference models — gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b — its first such release in six years. The move is widely seen as an effort to compete with Meta’s open-source Llama models and DeepSeek’s rapidly growing R1, both of which have gained traction in the developer and research communities.