OpenAI has roughly $11B of its $30B round target

OpenAI has only about $11 billion in commitments for a funding round it set out to raise at $30 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported on October 31, citing people familiar with the matter. The $1.25 trillion valuation was already public. The shortfall is the new part, and it comes from unnamed sources describing commitments so far.

The Journal puts the gap down to tepid interest from some large investors and to market jitters over the AI trade, which have cooled appetite even for one of the industry’s biggest names. The $11 billion is just over a third of the original target.

The valuation had already come down. Earlier reporting from Bloomberg and TechCrunch said OpenAI was in talks to raise at least $30 billion in a pre-IPO round at roughly $1.4 trillion. Then the Financial Times reported that OpenAI had trimmed its target to a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation, meaning the company’s value before the new cash is counted. CNBC described the round as close to finalizing at up to $30 billion, with investors from the United Arab Emirates among those involved.

Those two accounts can both hold. “Up to $30 billion” was the ceiling, and the Journal’s $11 billion is how much investors have committed against it so far. So a round described as nearly done at the reduced price is, by the Journal’s account, still well short of its size.

Even at the lower price, the round values OpenAI well above the $852 billion it was valued at in March, after a $122 billion round with Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank.