A source confirmed on Wednesday that Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital invested approximately $1 billion in OpenAI at a valuation of $285 billion in December.
It is a preferential acquisition in favor of the venture capital company, which has been a key financial supporter of the artificial intelligence startup.
OpenAI is in the process of completing a massive round of financing that could be worth more than $100 billion, potentially raising the company’s valuation to $800 billion.
The investment that Thrive Capital made towards the end of last year could be considered as an independent deal, but the company will most likely take part in the present round, as per the source.
Thrive declined to comment through a representative. The Wall Street Journal was first to report Thrive’s investment. Thrive declared in the first part of this month that it ended its most recent fund, which comprises above $10 billion.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has a close tie with Kushner, appreciated the news in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter). Altman wrote, “Extremely grateful to work with Josh. No one could ask for a more committed, more thoughtful, or harder-working investor.”
Kushner is well-connected with the White House because his father, Charles Kushner, is the U.S ambassador to France, and his brother, Jared Kushner, is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump.
OpenAI also became an ownership investor in Thrive Holdings on Monday, a company that acquires, owns, and operates businesses that it considers can benefit through technologies such as artificial intelligence. The startup did not specify the financial conditions of such an agreement.
CNBC previously reported that the most recent round of funding by OpenAI is likely to close in stages. Strategic investments such as those by Nvidia, SoftBank, and Amazon, which form about 90 percent of the round, will be raised first. Contributions from a broader pool of investors will follow.
Training frontier AI models costs hundreds of millions per iteration, and serving ChatGPT to hundreds of millions of users needs massive server farms. OpenAI has collaborated with Microsoft for compute resources, but scaling to match its ambitions apparently demands even more capital.
OpenAI’s major war chest gives it resources to maintain its lead, but also increases the stakes; expectations at a $285 billion valuation are immense.
